The Handler

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  His dark eyes searched mine, as if he could take the measure of me by peering into them. “Did he tell you that I don’t want to use it anymore?” Sasha asked. “Not ever again. I’m not here for that, so if that’s what you want, I might as well leave now, and we’ll just consider this all a misunderstanding.”

  Sasha’s instincts had gushed black. The sudden, fierce chill of it made me think he had tried to jack me. But he wasn’t cringing on the floor or screaming in terror—whatever was raising his most basic fear came from the depths of his own mind, not mine.

  “You’re afraid to use your ability?” I asked him.

  He looked away and examined the machinery that lined the nearby exterior wall. A mask of indifference dropped over his face, but his instincts burst into a writhing red mass. “All I’m saying is that I don’t ever want to do that kind of work again. Henry said…” Sasha faced me with his impassive look locked in place. “He said you would be different. That you would understand that some weapons should never be fired.”

  I nodded. Every jacker’s mind was a weapon, one that could easily be used for evil. For Sasha, however, it seemed to be something more. His ability fueled an inferno of fear and anger that he had to keep contained with an iron mask. The need to know what he could do sparked to life inside me.

  “I would never force you to use your ability against your will, Sasha,” I said. “You have my promise on that.”

  Sasha narrowed his eyes, studying me. No doubt looking for some reason to believe a promise from a jacker he had just met. Anna wouldn’t be too pleased about me making promises to someone barely inside our front door, but I couldn’t recruit people to our cause by forcing them to do things that terrified them. And my curiosity already burned like an itch I couldn’t scratch.

  “Can you at least tell me what it is?” I asked, trying not to let too much of that intensity show through in my voice. I swept out a hand, inviting him to the kitchen table where Anna stood, her hands resting on her hips. When I saw she had tucked a pistol in her waistband, I threw her a scowl. Her full military welcome wasn’t making this any easier.

  Sasha hesitated a long moment, then strode toward her. He ignored the weapons on the table and met Anna’s defiant glare. Her fingers silently drummed her hip, like they were warming up for shooting. I arrived at Sasha’s side, wishing my sister didn’t have such a hard head in so many ways. Linking a choice thought into her mind would have been very convenient at the moment.

  “I can erase you,” Sasha said to her, and my sister’s hand froze. “I can take away everything that makes you who you are, from your love of these weapons,” he glanced at the table, “to what kind of childhood you had, to the kind of person you want to marry. I can rewrite you into being someone completely new, down to every last personality quirk and habit and memory. Everything that is you would be gone. Permanently.”

  The muscles in Anna’s jaw worked. “I doubt that.”

  “My sister is probably immune to your charms,” I said, making a desperate bid to lighten the tension. “Seeing how most people can’t jack into her head at all.”

  “I don’t think that would be a problem for me,” he said. “All I would need is to touch you.” Anna flinched, even though Sasha had made no move towards her, and I could understand why. I had never heard of a jacker who had to touch someone to use their ability, which made me think Sasha’s ability was very different. And possibly able to breach Anna’s defenses… as well as mine.

  The hard edges of Sasha’s mask softened. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you. But you need to understand that I could destroy everything that you are. That’s what this is. That’s why it’s dangerous. And why I’ve vowed to never do it again, no matter what.” He swallowed and turned to me. “You have my promise on that. I can’t go on killing people’s souls.”

  I had no words for that. Air seemed frozen in my lungs as I wondered what price his soul had already paid for his ability.

  “Then why are you here?” Anna asked. No one but me would notice the slight shake in her voice, but then again, I could see the flashes of fear gripping her mind as well.

  He glanced at her, then turned study me. “Henry convinced me that you wanted to do something more than just whatever it took to survive. That you had some kind of plan to make things better. To make surviving worthwhile.”

  Tension drained from me like a receding wave, releasing the breath inside me. “Because surviving isn’t enough, is it?” I asked.

  He nodded slowly and a thrill ran up me. This was what I was looking for in a recruit, this drive for a better life for all of us.

  “Then Henry sent you to the right place,” I said. “Jackers are taking humanity into a future where the every rule will be rewritten. It will be a fight, but in the end, the world will be transformed, and people like you and me and Anna are going to be at the forefront of that change. You have this ability because you have a purpose to serve in carrying us forward.”

  Sasha frowned and stepped back, so I held up my hands to reassure him. “I’m not saying that you’ll have to use your ability. I’m saying there’s a reason for you to be here, if only for us to understand how it works, how we might manage it, in others as well as in you. We understand that this is something you were born with, not something that you chose.” I paused, taking a guess at why he had truly come to us. “And that, someday, you’d like to be something more.”

  He gave me a suspicious look, like he couldn’t quite believe the words coming out of my mouth. Black tendrils of fear seeped out again, and I fought the very strong temptation to handle them back into place. My mother’s voice tickled my mind; I needed to win him over on my words alone.

  He seemed balanced on a knife-edge of indecision. “You won’t make me use it?”

  “I gave you my promise.” I stole a look at Anna. Definitely not happy.

  Sasha followed my gaze, and a movement along the center row of racks caught our attention. Serena had wandered in from wherever she had been, her hands sporting more black marks. At least she had been trying to help out.

  “What kind of trick is this?” Sasha cried, stumbling back from the table. His shoulders went slack, his eyes glassy and staring at the floor. While Serena sauntered over, my mouth hung open.

  I shut it and ground out my words. “Release him. Now.”

  “Julian, love.” A pitying smile curled up her lips. “You have no idea how dangerous this one is.”

  A sick dread worked through my system. “That wasn’t a request,” I said. “Release him.”

  Serena reached the kitchen table and casually picked up one of the dart guns. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, pet.” She pointed the gun at me. Anna had her pistol out and trained on Serena’s chest before I could blink, but Serena was just as fast. Anna’s red-hot rage evaporated into a warm yellow mist. She inspected her weapon, then sat down at the table and happily started to disassemble it.

  Serena’s instincts still swirled the same confusing mash of colors. I could try to wrestle her for control of Sasha, but she would shoot me long before I won. I reached into the mass of color, hoping she wouldn’t pull the trigger before I figured out what to do with it.

  “It seems that you and Sasha have quite a history together,” I said quietly, to keep her calm and talking. I flipped the small vapor trail of fear instinct to peaceful yellow, but it made no difference.

  “Unfortunately, yes.” She scrunched her nose up at Sasha, who still stared at the ground. “I had honestly thought there was no one left from my previous Clan. Quite a bad bit of luck, him showing up here.”

  “That is unfortunate.” My stomach twisted as I realized her story from before was a complete lie, and that if I didn’t figure out how to control her, we might end up just like her old Clan. I grappled with a green, burning vapor while I inched forward. My stomach lurched as I amped up her mating instinct and lowered my voice, hating the soft tone I had to put into it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know he would upse
t you so much. What actually happened with your previous Clan? It might help if you talked about it.”

  I subdued the green mist, and a peaceful look descended on her face for a second, but then an angry red fog gushed up. The gun remained pointed at my chest.

  “They didn’t have a proper appreciation for my skills,” she said, as if they had offended her by using the wrong fork. “So I conducted a demonstration on the Clan leader’s brother, turning him on his own Clan. It got a bit more out of control than I had anticipated, but honestly, they all got what they deserved with that. It was messy, though, and I didn’t much care for that. Which was why I left before it was all done. Tricky one, this jacker.” She waved the gun at Sasha. Over half of her instincts still writhed with color: wisps of pink, a lava spill of orange, and a puff of pale blue that burned like acid. “He must have stopped the brother somehow, which even I couldn’t do, not once it was started anyway.”

  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.

  If you enjoyed The Handler, please leave a review. And don't miss Sasha's story in The Scribe.

  If you’ve read this story before any other Mindjack works, there's much more:

  Mindjack Trilogy (novels) and Mindjack Origins (shorts)

  Recommended Reading Order

  Mind Games (short story)

  Open Minds (Book One)

  Closed Hearts (Book Two)

  The Handler (short novella)

  The Scribe (short novella)

  Free Souls (Book Three)

  coming soon

  find all of Susan’s stories here

  Book One of the Mindjack Trilogy

  When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep.

  Sixteen-year-old Kira Moore is a zero, someone who can't read thoughts or be read by others. Zeros are outcasts who can't be trusted, leaving her no chance with Raf, a regular mindreader and the best friend she secretly loves. When she accidentally co
ntrols Raf's mind and nearly kills him, Kira tries to hide her frightening new ability from her family and an increasingly suspicious Raf. But lies tangle around her, and she's dragged deep into a hidden underworld of mindjackers, where having to mind control everyone she loves is just the beginning of the deadly choices before her.

  “Open Minds pushed me to the edge of my imagination and then tossed me over the edge as I screamed for more. When you can literally control the thoughts of others, how far will you go?” — Michelle Davidson Argyle, author of Monarch and Cinders

  Buy Open Minds Now

  Check out the Mindjack Trilogy website

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  (for future releases)

  Susan Kaye Quinn grew up in California, where she wrote snippets of stories and passed them to her friends during class. Her teachers pretended not to notice and only confiscated her notes a couple times. She pursued a bunch of engineering degrees (Aerospace, Mechanical, and Environmental) and worked a lot of geeky jobs, including turns at GE Aircraft Engines, NASA, and NCAR. Now that she writes novels, her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" and she doesn't have to sneak her notes anymore.

  Which is too bad.

  All that engineering comes in handy when dreaming up paranormal powers in future worlds or mixing science with fantasy to conjure slightly plausible inventions. For her stories, of course. Just ignore that stuff in her basement.

  Susan writes from the Chicago suburbs with her three boys, two cats, and one husband. Which, it turns out, is exactly as much as she can handle.

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