The Legend of ZERO: The Scientist, the Rat, and the Assassin

by Sara King

  Efrit-boy gave him a blank look.

  Sam impatiently gestured at Rat. “Translate.”

  “The baby isn’t where it’s supposed to be,” Rat said, having had two months with the crazy furgling to learn some of his lingo. “It could kill her.”

  “Yes, that!” Sam cried. “That’s my guess, anyway. Ectopic pregnancy. Very bad. Could be appendicitis, though she’s not feverish. Has there been pain during her bowel movements or has she experienced any vaginal bleeding?”

  Efrit-boy turned to Rat with a small frown. “He’s what, a walking encyclopedia?”

  Rat snorted. “If only you knew.”

  “So…” Efrit-boy said, “…Twelve-B is going to die?”

  Sam grimaced. “Well, not if I can get her to a lab. I think I can probably help her in time. It’s only been a month, right? How long ago did she start hurting? A week? Two?”

  “What, am I a mind-reader, now?” Efrit-boy demanded.

  “Are you?” Rat snapped.

  Efrit-boy scowled at her. “The fuck is her problem?”

  Sam smoothly said, “Concentrate, Mickey. If you have any idea how long it’s been, I need to know. It’ll help me figure out how much time I’ve got to prepare before something ruptures.”

  “Keeping in mind I don’t have a calendar and nobody’s given a shit about what day it is for months,” Efrit boy said, “maybe two weeks?”

  “Ah,” Sam said. “That explains it.” He sucked a breath in through his teeth, then seemed to shake himself. “Well, I can’t make any judgements for sure until I can get to some sort of imaging hardware and see what we’re dealing with. But yeah, if it’s what I think it is, it’s a strong possibility. Could be anything, though…”

  Efrit-boy stiffened. He eyed Twelve-B, who had happily sunk to the ground and was piling rounded river stones on top of one another. “She won’t like going back. It’ll make her upset.”

  What he left unsaid was, And when she gets upset, she turns things to stone.

  “Drugs,” Sam agreed. “We need drugs.” He gestured at Rat. “You. Take us to town. We need to make a pharmaceuticals run.”

  The idea of intentionally making a childlike Human weapon loopy didn’t exactly rank as one of the smartest things she’d ever heard, but she nodded anyway, because if Samuel Dobbs had said he planned to kill a kreenit with a rock, she would have asked him what size rock he needed, and when.

  Besides, she could always kill them on Wednesday…

  #

  The Paper Man

  Slade hesitated in the brush at the edge of the town, listening. “What do you think?”

  She had been staring out at the town for almost ten minutes, now, making absolutely no effort to leave the screen of brush where they huddled. Instead of responding, she just shook her head.

  “Well, we can’t just sit here,” he replied. She still hadn’t told him what was bugging her, almost as if she didn’t know herself. Slade glanced at the two experiments behind them. The thirteen-series, unlike his innocent—and utterly oblivious—companion, had been watching and listening to everything they said with extreme distrust written all over his long, almost lizardine features.

  Not only did he look at least partially Efrit—the chin-scales and pointed ears were hard to miss—but Slade suspected he had the Efrit hivemaster ability to kill with a touch, something that had been mentioned as a desirable attribute several times in the experiment documents. The most obvious, glaring clue was the fact that the man wore black Congie gloves along with the designer jeans and T-shirt. And, as long as Slade had watched, Thirteen-D hadn’t touched anyone but Twelve-B. In fact, several times, he had avoided touching him and Rat, when given the chance.

  He really hoped Rat didn’t put that much together. Hivemasters were rare, and they never left their home-planets, being exempt from the Draft by a special accord of Congress. The likelihood that Rat had ever heard of one, much less seen one, was pretty astronomical. The Efrit paid their tribute, didn’t create waves with the other members of Congress, kept species-homogenous planets, and never rebelled.

  Rat would have had no reason to ever go to an Efrit planet, much less meet a hivemaster, and the fact that the kid was obviously a telekinetic seemed to have thrown her off. After all, it had been stated several times in the experiment records that the gene expressed itself in one way—either a minder, a mover, or a maker. But, despite knowing that, Slade was left with one very obvious, glaring truth, one he hoped she was too much of a layman to understand: The mentals’ gene didn’t produce scales. They hadn’t used anything with scales.

  Which meant the Human scientists had been experimenting with adding something new before they got busted.

  It was all so utterly exciting. He really hoped the Congie could keep her cool until she got to know them—he really didn’t want to have to kill them. As a scientist himself, the potential—and sheer amount of work that the two experiments behind them represented—was mind-blowing.

  Much like their current three-egg omelet breakfasts care of his self-made chickens, it all hinged on making the Congie see that having the two lab-rats alive outweighed the benefits of having them dead.

  …which meant he needed to have a one-on-one conversation with Thirteen-D, preferably with the Congie twenty miles distant. Clearing his throat, he said, “Okay, how about you go scout for bad guys before we drag these two out into the open.” He gestured at the ruined streets ahead of them. “I’ll stay with these two.”

  Rat glanced at their two companions and grimaced. “You sure you want to stay behind with them?” Like she was discussing him hanging out with armed nuclear warheads.

  Slade sighed. “I’ll be fine. They like me, see?” He grinned at Thirteen-D, who gave him an unreadable look back.

  She glared at him and loudly popped another plasma chamber into her gun. “Fine. I’ll be back in two hours.” It was strange how she wasn’t even giving an argument. Almost like…she didn’t want Slade to come along.

  Indeed, before Slade could quiz her on it, she got up and headed off to scout out their trail.

  Slade watched her until she was out of earshot, then turned to tell the young man he needed to be careful what he said around Rat.

  Too late, Slade realized that the teenager had pulled a glove off and had stepped up behind him while Slade had been watching the Congie. Slade saw a flash of glowing green fingertips, then blurted, “Oh balls.” Grimly meeting Slade’s startled look, the young man’s hand snatched out and grabbed Slade’s wrist.

  Instantly, every signal from his brain to his body suddenly shut off, and Slade went into total paralysis and drooped to the ground. His attacker followed calmly, kneeling beside him, still holding him by one hand. Because he could do nothing else, Slade just stared up at the man holding him, mouth agape.

  Thirteen-D held him for several moments, a frown forming on his face. His vivid purple eye grew dark, then started to scowl, then closed as his brow tightened into a heavy frown. Then he started to tremble and groan.

  This, Slade thought, is where he snips my strings and leaves me to die.

  Thirteen-D released him suddenly, gasping. He fell backwards, away from Slade, and just stared across the dried brown grasses, his violet eye wide in shock, mouth open in confusion.

  Slade sat up, feeling tingly and somewhat numb all over, like his whole body had just woken from a dead nerve. “I take it you liked what you saw?” he asked, rubbing his forehead.

  “What the hell are you?” Thirteen-D demanded, panting. He, too, was sprawled in much the same manner, looking like he was also having trouble with motor control.

  Still seated on his ass because his legs had not yet regained their feeling, Slade made his best attempt at a bow, which actually resulted in him smacking his own forehead with a numb hand and wincing. “The Tesla of the Congressional Era.”

  “You’re not Human,” Thirteen-D growled. “There was too much to take.”

  Slade froze and blinked at the k
id. So that is why he speaks so well, he thought. He’s been assimilating them. It occurred to him that, if the kid had managed to absorb his memories and personality a la the Efrit hivemasters, Thirteen-D would have no further need for Slade, and could do the operation himself.

  Which, apparently, had crossed the kid’s mind, as well. Slade glanced at the glove, which had been dropped to the ground by his knee, then at the kid’s hand, which was eerily longer and more slender than a Human’s, and was lined with small emerald scales along the inside of each knuckle. The underside tips of each finger seemed to luminesce in a soft green light, with something purple radiating from a point on the kid’s palm, just out of sight.

  “How many have you absorbed so far?” Slade asked softly.

  The kid gave him a wary look, then raised his chin in challenge. “Five.”

  Slade stiffened. He knew, without a doubt, that the knowledge would get Thirteen-D killed if even a whisper of it went to the Congie. “And that’s how you knew how to use the nanos?”

  Thirteen-D nodded slowly, though he had begun looking like a hunted thing. Beside him, Twelve-B was obliviously building a little teepee out of sticks.

  “You were in a special section of the lab?” Slade offered. “Because they were more afraid of you than the telepaths, right?”

  “They were afraid of me,” Thirteen-D said slowly, “but Twelve-A scared them more. Me, they just locked gloves on my hands. Twelve-S got them off for me, when we escaped. Then the Congies killed her.”

  “Ah.” Slade gave the kid—he couldn’t be more than seventeen—a careful look. “You were going to take my mind, kill me, and help Twelve-B on your own, weren’t you?”

  Thirteen-D flushed and looked away. “I don’t trust scientists.” Which meant, yes, he had planned on killing him. And somehow Slade’s labyrinthine mind had spared him that particular fate. That was comforting.

  Acutely aware that Thirteen-D could still bash his formidable brains open on a rock with a mental flick of his thoughts, Slade said, “So, have we decided not to kill me yet?”

  “No,” Thirteen-D growled, scowling up at him. The young man couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds and was missing an eye, but Slade had no misconceptions about who would win in a staring contest.

  “How much did you get?” Slade asked, curious. He had always wondered how much of genius was innate and how much was learned. His jenfurgling brother had made him think that genetics didn’t have much to do with it, meaning it was either spontaneous—Slade’s personal theory—or learned.

  Thirteen-D gave him a suspicious look, then, when Slade just waited, he grimaced. “A lot. But it doesn’t make much sense.”

  Innate, then. Interesting. Slade assumed that, by tapping into his experiences and memories, Thirteen-D had probably just experienced the disconcertion that a third-grader would get opening up an advanced college textbook. Well, a normal third-grader. When Slade had been nine, he had found PhD-program textbooks fascinating.

  Then something disturbing occurred to Slade. “That telekinesis… Were you born with it? Or did you take it from someone?”

  Instantly, Thirteen-D’s face grew guarded. His violet eye lingering on Slade’s face, he eventually looked away and watched Twelve-B build her teepee.

  Slade felt his mouth open in a little O. Another word for the Efrit hivemasters was ‘ooreinaga’, an Ooreiki word for ‘soul-stealer.’ Perhaps they would have to kill this one, if he was running around stealing people’s minds.

  “Believe me,” Thirteen-D said softly, still watching his companion. “I wouldn’t have taken him if I didn’t have to. Chuckles was…filth. And now he’s in me, and I can’t let him go because his power is what’s protecting us.”

  So the kid wasn’t stupid. “Where’d you get your speech patterns from?” Slade asked. “Sounds like someone used to the streets.”

  Thirteen-D’s face was dark. “In the Dark Room, they made me take a kid. Some petty thief they kidnapped in LA. They tried to get me to take one of the experiments, but I refused, so they put me in solitary confinement thinking it would make me more pliable.”

  Of course they did. Because they were scientists. “Let me guess,” Slade said. “One of their nine-series? Maybe an eight-series?”

  Thirteen-D’s eye sharpened with suspicion, but he nodded.

  “And,” Slade offered, “how did you take telekinesis from someone like Chuckles?”

  Thirteen-D gave him another wary look. “I took him into me.”

  “And it killed him?” Slade demanded. As far as he knew, though a large part of Efrit culture was to kidnap enemy warriors and have their hivemasters assimilate them, hivemasters did not have to kill their victims. If the enemy warriors were particularly gifted or honorable, they could bond with them, like a biological transmitter, wiping out all previous hive-links, and integrate them into the nest. Doubtless, the Human scientists had been intending to create generals to lead their psychic army. Not only would something like Thirteen-D be useful for capturing and turning Congress’s own forces against it, but he could in theory be used to control someone like Twelve-A. Telepaths like Twelve-A were simply too empathetic to kill reliably on their own. “Does it necessarily have to kill them?”

  “I tug them out,” Thirteen-D said warily. “Tugging them out kills them. You’re the first one I couldn’t tug out.”

  “But do you have to?” Slade demanded. “Or could you absorb my memories without ‘tugging me out’?”

  “I can take some,” Thirteen-D said, “but it takes a lot more time. Easier to take it all.”

  “And you could do it without hurting me?” Slade demanded. “Without removing that memory? You’d just duplicate it?”

  Thirteen-D eyed him with suspicion. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, reluctantly, he said, “No one has held still for me to try.”

  Though the small, rational part of Slade’s brain was mentioning things like Human vegetables and drooling inebriates, the scientist part of Slade was rubbing his hands together with glee. “Try on me. Try copying something annoying, like my brother.”

  The experiment cocked his head at Slade, frowning. “You would hold still for that? Knowing what I…do? That you might…lose it?”

  “Gladly,” Slade laughed. “The bastard is a dick.”

  Thirteen-D had taken on that squinty look that both Rat and Tyson got when they were wondering how many times Slade had been dropped as a child. Then, glancing at Twelve-B, who had begun pulling grass and laying it down inside her ‘teepee’, Thirteen-D reluctantly moved forward, lifting his hand towards Slade’s head.

  Slade caught the man by the wrist and turned his hand over to get a good look at the underside. As Thirteen-D stiffened, Slade whistled. He had read about the palms of the hivemasters from those intrepid explorers who had been able to gain special access to the Efrit, but as of yet, no one had managed to get a picture. “Wow,” Slade said, staring. A cold wash of goosebumps had erupted down his spine, and his heart had started to suddenly hammer in his chest. “That’s…hard to explain.”

  Indeed, looking into the man’s palm was like looking into a…portal. A vortex. A swirling field of dim violet light that seemed to go on forever. The glowing green pads of each long, slender fingertip almost acted like satellites, fireflies around an arcane campfire.

  Looking at Thirteen-D’s palm, for once, Slade didn’t have an explanation. Or, for that matter, a hypothesis. It was much like the scales of the Dhasha. Once, when he was bored, Slade had purchased a Dhasha scale, intent on proving to the world that there was nothing otherworldly about them, and that they were simply a biologically ingenious grouping of molecules into some yet-undiscovered alloy.

  Two weeks later, Slade had quietly dumped the scale into a trash bin and gone on to research rich men’s bank accounts. That, at least, he had understood.

  Slowly, his small wrist still encased in Slade’s hand, Thirteen-D closed his fist, eying Slade like a nervous animal.

&nbs
p; “So,” Slade said, still staring at the closed fist, “when you ‘tug them out,’ where do they go?”

  It took Thirteen-D a moment to reply. “In me,” he said softly. “Until I let them go.”

  “I…see.” Slade’s skin was still crawling with goosebumps. “What happens when you ‘let them go?’ They die?”

  “No, they’re already dead,” Thirteen-D said.

  Slade swallowed hard. Ooreinaga. Soul-stealer. The Ooreiki, who were extremely sensitive about such things, had, in a move of uncharacteristic violence, demanded that Congress kill all the Efrit once the first hivemaster was discovered, and, when they had been overruled by the Jahul, had refused to cast a vote on the Species Recognition Board in protest.

  “You trap them inside?” Slade asked softly, fighting a wave of nausea, remembering the weird violet portal. “Your…victims? They stay with you?”

  Thirteen-D was still frowning at him. “Chuckles is still with me. I let the others go. I didn’t need them.”

  Lovely. Slade didn’t have any misconceptions as to what the little Efrit would have done with him, had he managed to ‘tug him out’. Thirteen-D would have digested him, salvaged what he wanted, then Slade would have become the psychic equivalent of a particularly massive log of shit.

  Slade peered down at the experiment’s closed fist, which was still glowing slightly around the edges of the palm, where Thirteen-D’s curled fingers weren’t hiding it. Suddenly, he was very much questioning the brilliance in allowing this creature to touch him again. Swallowing hard, he looked up at Thirteen-D.

  “Having second thoughts?” Thirteen-D said. He didn’t sound surprised, but he did sound…disappointed? Like he had wanted to try copying some memories from a willing subject, and Slade’s offer had actually given him some weird kind of hope. Like the hope of a man who finds themselves so completely different from everyone else that he doesn’t really expect to fit in, much less be trusted.