Sharp

by Alex Hughes

  We stopped, and she opened the passenger door, shaking out the umbrella.

  “Hello, Adam,” Tamika said, and got in the car. “Thank you, Sibley.”

  The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place, but it was too late.

  * * *

  The van was being raised by a hydraulic lift, a slow, heavy lift with a square concrete floor currently climbing the floors of the parking garage, like the main arm on a soda machine. As another floor went by, through the open space between them I could see pine trees below, nearly endless pine trees yellowed with pollution.

  The lift drew even with a floor perhaps ten stories above ground level, its concrete edge lining up with the edge of the permanent floor. Ahead, through maybe a hundred feet of textured reinforced concrete, a large wide door stood open under a sign that said DYMANI SYSTEMS, BUILDING 4, LOADING.

  Tamika twisted around in the passenger seat, and Sibley brought up Bellury’s gun. The car doors were locked and the lock next to me was busted off, so that the only way to get out was through one of them. The mesmerizing force from Sibley was starting to wear off, and I could speak again.

  “I have one question,” I said to Tamika, ignoring Sibley by sheer force of will. “Why Emily? Did you plan her death from the beginning?”

  “No,” Tamika said. She paused for a moment, like she was considering whether to speak to me. Finally she shrugged. “No, I really did think she hated the Guild and the normals as much as she was pretending. But all she wanted was the money, and then she wanted to do the right thing.” She laughed, a sound entirely devoid of mirth. “I guess she got that from you, Professor. You’d think she would have learned better.”

  I sat up, ready to extend my—

  “Settle down, don’t use your telepathy, and don’t fight this,” Sibley told me, that hateful blinking cube in his hands. The cube—I realized all at once that this must be Tamika’s machine. The machine she built from that sketch. From Dane’s teaching.

  “You created a brain wave compulsion machine. To make up for your lack of Ability.”

  “The Ability you stole from me!” her voice snapped.

  And then Tamika, the sweet girl I’d taught for years, the quiet, nice, polite woman I’d known, grabbed Sibley’s gun. She settled herself against the back of the passenger-side seat and shot one bullet before I could react. I winced, braced for pain—but there was none.

  Next to me, Bellury cried out and was suddenly awake and clutching his shoulder. A steady litany of cursing while he went for a gun at his side, a gun that wasn’t there, his hands clumsy in the cuffs.

  Three more shots, deafening in the small space. Boom. Boom. Crack.

  The warmth of blood hit my face—warm, sticky blood—and that horrible, horrible calm imploded.

  In Mindspace, the world sucked in in a burst, a black hole of death realized. I fought my way away, away, anything to keep from being sucked in . . . and finally succeeded.

  In reality, in the car, the strong, acrid smell of urine filled the air, and the side of my leg next to Bellury was wet. His body slumped toward me, his head hitting my shoulder with a thud.

  I pushed him away, frantically. Bellury was . . . Bellury was . . .

  The van’s sliding door on the right side away from me opened, and Tamika’s arm pulled Bellury away, down, with gravity, until he slumped on the ground outside the car. Then she shot him again, standing over him.

  She turned back to me, meeting my eyes, and suddenly the nice girl I’d known was gone.

  “You should have died in the gutter. You should have lost everything—like I did. And since you didn’t—I’ll take my justice from you.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “Keep your thoughts to yourself and stay put,” Sibley told me, and that mesmerizing compulsion spread over me again until I couldn’t—I couldn’t think about moving. I stared at him, unable to help myself, as he walked around the car to Tamika.

  He walked down to the huge doors to our left, box still in hand, and as he walked I realized the doors were much bigger than I’d thought. And the company name—Dynami Systems, the same company that Emily had worked for. My eyes continued to follow Sibley as he walked, this fascination almost—almost but not quite—keeping me from thinking about Emily, who I’d failed. Tamika, who I’d failed just as badly. Bellury, who . . . my mind shied away.

  “We need to go,” Sibley said as two guys with guns came out of the entrance. He gestured for them to go toward the van. “Unload this thing—fast this time. Watch the electronics—they’re delicate. And you, miss, you’ll need to check in with the boss.” He projected his voice loudly enough to echo off the sides of the specialty material that made up the walls of the garage.

  “Why are these two here? And why are you running so late?” Tamika asked. “This is not what we agreed on. Fiske said you’d—”

  “I’d do the job and do it well. But you keep hamstringing me with requests. I specifically warned you the risks went up if we kept the association with the airport. You knew the smuggling was risky.”

  Tamika moved toward him. “And you were supposed to kill him last week anyway!”

  “It was too early, I told you that.” And they degenerated into an argument while I fought the compulsion, slowly, slowly, trying to wiggle out of a too-tight straitjacket.

  Bellury lying there, just lying there, only fueled the anger that let me fight.

  Finally it occurred to me—I didn’t have to move. Not outwardly. I didn’t even have to call for help; thinking that thought still hurt, actually hurt. I could no more call for help than I could run a marathon in the next two seconds. But I didn’t have to.

  As Sibley walked down to talk to one of the guards, I took a breath and poked at the watcher’s tracker in my head, poked hard—the one thing Cherabino had forbidden me to do. I poked harder, searing pain washing over me, pain like an ice pick to the brain—but I couldn’t move.

  Pain. Pain. Pain. Like a beacon, almost, or a nasty lighthouse run by a madman, shooting lasers instead of plain simple light. Pain. Only then did I stop poking at it. Only then . . .

  And in the quiet afterward, while I was trying to catch my breath, came the smell and the taste of Cherabino. Beautiful, annoyed, competent, angry Cherabino.

  What the hell are you doing? she asked me mind to mind. I told you to stop it with the moods! And the pain, that’s just . . . She thought of kicking my ass, literally, figuratively, and then flipping me over onto my face on the concrete while her knee went in my back and she gave me a long, detailed lecture about how she needed to work.

  I stared at the carpeted car floor for a long moment, trying to catch up. The compulsion didn’t apply to this, I told myself. It was a Link, not telepathy. Not telepathy. I made myself believe it. Cherabino!

  What, asshole?

  I found Tamika and Sibley—but he has this thing. It’s a compulsion machine. I think she made it—she used to work for Dane. She has the skills. I don’t know. They took us to a small office park on North Druid Hills, in a Dymani Systems building. I can see armed men over by the entrance, but I can’t move. I need help. Please. Now. Bellury’s alarm thing went off, but they shut it down. And then, with panic I couldn’t suppress, They killed him. He’s dead. They killed him.

  Shock and anger pushed over the Link like fire; then they were gone, and Cherabino’s no-nonsense cop thinking snapped into place. Where are you? How many are there?

  I replayed my memories of the day in a panicked fast-forward stream—Stop. She breathed. Stop!

  I stopped. What’s wrong?

  I’m not a . . . damn it, you’re giving me a migraine. Stick to words, okay? Words. She was struggling not to put up the walls again, struggling to put her own crap aside and deal with the situation. I’m not a damn telepath. I need words.

  With the compulsion weakening, I looked over at the bui
lding entrance and tried to get a view in Mindspace of how many there were. I don’t know, at least ten.

  Damn it, Cherabino said. Half a dozen police cars with heavy rifles. At minimum. We can’t see what’s in that building, and odds are that’s where you’ll be by the time we get there. Damn it, Adam, that takes hours to requisition. Days, worse. I can’t just . . . Are you sure he’s dead?

  He’s gone from Mindspace. The sound of the door lock disengaging made me look up in panic.

  Call Kara, I told Cherabino, fear running down the Link without me helping it.

  The door next to me opened, and two men with guns and a female telepath of considerable strength stared at me. She was Tamika’s age, give or take, pale with freckles and no sense of humor.

  After that was . . .

  Like a knife to butter, something tore through the connection between me and Cherabino and I was stuck, alone, in my own head, the watcher’s tag hitting me with pain in response, like an ice pick to the brain.

  Someone grabbed my sleeve and I fell, my side hitting the concrete with bruising force.

  I reached back out again, again, past the pain, gripping—and hit a fog, the frustrating horrible fog of a local Mindspace telepathic block. The woman scowled down at me. “We’re going to have to move to plan C. This idiot managed to talk to somebody before I shut him down. This is going to cost us extra time.”

  Then she nodded to one of the beefy guards. He hit me across the head with the butt of his gun, and with a burst of stars, the world went black.

  * * *

  I woke up with the female telepath standing over me. I jumped back—and couldn’t. I was sitting in an old-style wooden chair, my hands bound behind my back and to the chair. I tested the bonds.

  “I wouldn’t,” the telepath told me. She was slight of build with a heart-shaped face, not very tall, and her dirty-blond hair and freckles might disarm most of her opponents enough for her to get in the first strike. Me, on the other hand—well, I’d had my ass kicked too many times by Jamie, who looked like a young cookie-baking grandmother. Looks didn’t mean anything when it came to the mind.

  I eased back, noting that my legs were free. She was at the wrong angle for me to kick her. Time to try words instead. “So you’re a Minder, huh?” My brain kept flashing back to Bellury, and I kept forcing it down. Get through this first. Get through this, and then you can think about it. “Wait, are you the missing telepath?”

  Her brow wrinkled. “How did you . . . ?”

  I nodded to her tailored skirt. “Um, well, that’s standard issue for Minders who don’t have the cash yet to blend in with the fancy clients. Nobody else wants that gray-brown color. Plus you have a brighter spot on the shirt from where your badge was. Right breast pocket, standard-issue size.” Actually the shirt wasn’t all that faded, but when her hand went to the spot, I knew I was right. “And a telepath disappeared at the same time Tamika did. It should have been obvious you were working together. Do you have a name?”

  “Coleen,” she said, and crossed her arms in a stance that was probably supposed to be intimidating. Her cuteness didn’t blunt the real threat she posed.

  “No last name?”

  “None that I’m giving you. You realize I’ve seen your file. You’re not the first Structure guy I’ve ridden herd on.”

  I suppressed the urge to make the obvious sexual comment and stuck to something more neutral. “You’re counting on me to be out of practice, then?” Hopefully my injury hadn’t made it into the file, at least not the version she’d seen. Some advantages to secrets, after all.

  Coleen nodded. “You’re old, and you haven’t had to take recurrents. Plus Structure guys are slow. And you’ve been working for normals, which is even worse.”

  And that got me the last bit of information I needed. She didn’t know about my injury, and she was definitely a Minder, and a young one at that. If she was relatively fresh from graduation (which the clothes implied, either that or some large expense I didn’t know about), well, she’d definitely have a much better reaction time mind to mind than I would, even at full strength and practice. That’s what Minders were trained for, after all, protecting high-profile clients from anything mental anyone could throw at them. And from what little I could see of her presence in Mindspace through the blocking shield, she wasn’t weak, and she wasn’t careless. She’d be a strong mental guard, here to make sure I didn’t call for help.

  I shifted in the chair a bit, unable to keep myself from pulling at the bonds. “What do you—”

  She took a step back and Mindspace suddenly felt charged. “Seriously, don’t. I didn’t give up my spot in the Guild to go down to an out-of-practice punk. You won’t get ten feet before I take you down like I took down that saleslady.”

  She had killed Emily’s boss? Another question answered too late. I’d stay put for now, save my move until she wasn’t expecting it.

  I finally let myself take a look around. We were in an office, a medium-sized basic office from a hundred movies and even more office buildings, a file cabinet or four to the front of the room, a battered metal desk, plain beige walls, and a bookcase. Nothing exciting. Nothing interesting. Not even a window to climb out of. The phone jack in the wall, not far from the closed heavy door, led to an old-style black boxy phone on the desk. “You don’t expect me to try to strangle you with the telephone cord?”

  She blinked, and a burst of nervousness floated through Mindspace before she damped it down. Interesting. I’d been bluffing, but if physical confrontation made her nervous, I could work with that.

  “Why give up your spot in the Guild anyway?” I asked, to keep the conversation going, trying to get all the information out of her I could. “You’re a little young to know Tamika as a classmate, and illegal Tech seems an odd thing for a Minder to get involved in.”

  “Tamika works in the logistics office,” Colleen said, in that tone of voice teenagers take with adults, like I was too stupid to live. She was too old for it to look natural. “She helped me get something through one of the couriers. And then she helped me get a deal with enough money for my brother to—” She shut up then, frowning, like she’d just caught on. “I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to get me to like you so I won’t burn you out later. Well, it’s not going to work.”

  Of course it was going to work; she was practically handing me all her secrets on a platter, shielding in Mindspace or none. I had this down.

  And then she hit me with pain—real, honest-to-goodness pain, pain that ripped me open and up, pain down every single nerve fiber I had, the pain of a third-degree burn over every inch of my body. My skin, my fat, my very bone burning away in red-hot fire.

  An interminable time later, she let it go. I panted, desperately, my muscles knotted and sore from spasms; the echo of my screams still hung in the air.

  That stance—her arms crossed, her too-young eyes weighing me—that stance no longer seemed cute.

  She was stronger than me, probably, and her pain tolerance was a hell of a lot stronger than mine. For the first time since I’d awakened, I started to sweat in earnest.

  * * *

  Faintly, faintly, I heard Cherabino’s presence poking at me from the inside.

  Adam. Adam, pay attention, damn it! Her tone was like she was yelling at me, but the volume was barely above a whisper, like Coleen’s interdiction shield couldn’t quite block a Link even with its best efforts. Adam!

  What? I replied, with as much mental volume down the Link as I could manage without leaking into Mindspace. Tell me you’re almost here. I was starting to get tired, and in this context, that wasn’t good for my life expectancy.

  You should be able to hear the sirens. Five, ten minutes tops. Traffic is hell on North Druid Hills. Hang in there.

  I glanced at Coleen and looked away. I had to keep my body language completely neutral—otherwise she’d
suspect I was up to something. For not the first time, I was glad communication over a Link didn’t travel through Mindspace; if I was careful, I’d get away with this.

  Any new information about the layout? Cherabino asked.

  Boxy building with a huge deck with a lift on the side, with a bunch of trucks parked on the lower levels. There’s at least one strong telepath and six guards in addition to Sibley and Tamika.

  Who’s Tamika?

  The one I told you about earlier. She’s the one who killed Bellury. And Emily. The girl I burned out at the Guild. The one with the box that can make you do what they say. I took a breath, forced myself to think of anything that could help her. I strongly doubt they’re alone here. I got the impression . . . it was only a second. If I had to guess, if my life depended on it . . .

  It might.

  I took another breath, slowly, so as not to attract attention. Maybe fifteen minds, then, maybe twenty, and all of them strong and professional. Be careful, there’s at least one building behind this one. Worst case, more reinforcements; best, well, you’ve got office workers to think about. Either way—these people are good, Cherabino. Coming after them is going to be extremely dangerous.

  If you think I’m leaving you there, you’re an idiot. Just give me a better idea of where—

  Another intense burning pain stole my breath and made me scream out loud, burning horrible melting pain—

  And when I came back to myself, the feeling of Cherabino was gone. Utterly gone. Worse, the door opened, and Sibley, Tamika, and an armed guard walked in.

  * * *

  “Be still,” Sibley told me, and that weird mesmerizing thing happened again; I literally could not take my eyes from him.

  Beside him, Coleen stood, still wary, and on the other side, Tamika. The guard took a stance next to the door. And Sibley pulled the telephone line from the wall and detached it from the phone.

  “Unfortunately, the latest batch of my cords has a regrettable tendency to shatter,” he said in a quiet tone, and pulled the telephone cord tight. “I’m afraid we don’t have much time now; my employer is expecting us to maintain his schedule tightly. But. We have a few more pallets to load. So. This lady has given my employer a great deal of useful resources and information. In return, she has about ten minutes here where she gets whatever she wants.”