Text copyright © 2012 by Susan Kaye Quinn
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www.susankayequinn.com
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www.mindjacktrilogy.com
Free Souls is the final novel in the Mindjack Trilogy.
Summary: Kira Moore has joined the Jacker Freedom Alliance and lives for the day she can destroy jacker-hating FBI Agent Kestrel, but when the National Guard surrounds Jackertown, she’s forced to take on a mission that may be her last: assassinating the world’s leading anti-jacker politician, Sentor Vellus.
December 2012 Edition
ISBN-13: 978-0-9882670-5-3
Cover by D. Robert Pease
www.WalkingStickBooks.com
Edited by Anne Victory
“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” — C.S. Lewis
For my mom,
a free soul if I’ve ever met one.
“Quinn paints a picture of a not-too-distant America where politicians inflame the hatred of one section of the populace for another—all for their own gain—and you worry that her world is not so far off from our own.”
—Dianne Salerni, author of We Hear the Dead, The Caged Graves, and the forthcoming The Eighth Day
“Free Souls starts with a bang and doesn't let up. Like a mash-up of all your favorite science-fiction adventures from Star Wars to The Legend of Korra, it blends nonstop action, nail-biting escapes, and great romance. I absolutely loved it! A great series conclusion—a must-read.”
—Leigh Talbert Moore, author of Rouge and The Truth About Faking
“Susan did it again. Free Souls was WOW! I expected Kira to step up to her role as heroine but not like this. Surprises kept coming until the very end which tied up more loose ends than I knew existed. Warning: Don't start reading until you have time to finish. I didn't want to put Free Souls down for a second. It's that kind of book.”
—Sher A. Hart, Goodreads Review
Julian’s whispered words drifted past my ears and disturbed the dead quiet of the street, still hushed by the early morning hour.
“You don’t have to do this, Kira.”
I didn’t respond, just leaned into the concrete wall next to him and watched the thin trails of smoke lace the frosty November air. A slow-burn acid was eating through the metal door hinges of the Crawford power plant, and we were close enough that the acrid smell singed my nose.
Julian’s second-in-command, Hinckley, pressed flat against the wall opposite us, huddled tight with his squad of mindjackers in an attack formation. Hinckley’s extreme talent was his ability to manipulate many jackers at once, but it was his military background that made him so valuable to Julian. Some of Hinckley’s men were ex-military as well, bringing their urban-combat training along when they joined Julian’s revolution, but today they were armed with dart guns in accordance with Julian’s no-kill policy for the mission. I reached my mind out to Hinckley, pushing through his tough mindbarrier to link a thought. His mindscent was crisp, like rubbing alcohol, and stung almost as much as the acid.
You ready to do this?
He flicked a look to his men, probably doing a wordless check. Yes, ma’am, came his reply. As soon as the acid is through, Jameson will take the door and toss the smoke bomb. Then we’ll be right behind you, laying down suppression. Just like we trained. His fingers drummed the barrel of his dart gun but still kept discipline, his trigger finger staying clear until ready to shoot.
My own dart gun was safely tucked in the back of my pants.
“Kira,” Julian said quietly. “I mean it. It’s not too late to do this differently.” I turned to face him in our tight spot against the wall, and his words floated on a ghost of breath that caressed the air between us. A familiar tug inside wanted me to breathe in his soft words and drink in the concerned look in his glacier-blue eyes. I almost leaned closer to him, but it wouldn’t be mesh to hug Julian right before an op. Or any time, really. I blinked and focused on the flak jacket snugged tight over his ultralite winter coat. It wasn’t mesh to whisper in front of a door we were about to break down, either, but Julian’s extreme jacking ability included mental defenses that scared up my worst nightmares, so linking in to his mind wasn’t an option.
I kept my voice low. “You want this to be a covert operation, right?” If the Feds knew we had taken the plant, they would send a battalion of jack police to take it back. “Someone needs to stop the staff from calling for help. Last I checked, you don’t have any other jackers who can run up two floors to the control room in under three seconds.”
The Crawford plant was three stories of crumbling red brick on the outside, but inside, a state-of-the art hydrogenerator pumped life-giving power to Jackertown. Unfortunately, the mindreaders held the plant, and with winter creeping up on us, they could shut down Julian’s revolution simply by turning off the power and freezing us out. We needed to get in, scribe the twenty workers into being jacker-friendly subversives, and get out before anyone suspected a thing. But a mindwave disruptor shield encased the building, which meant they expected an attack, or at least were prepared for one. Inside, they would have anti-jacker helmets, conventional weapons, and whatever jacker-tuned technology the government had cooked up in the last three months.
“Once we take out the door,” Julian said, “we’ll be past the shield and able to jack anyone on the first floor. You can hold back, wait for us to clear the room. Then, with your extended reach, you can stop anyone inside the plant.”
“Unless they’ve got helmets,” I said. “Then it’ll take time to fight our way in, time we don’t have. They’ll be shooting bullets at us, Julian, not tranq darts.”
“Which is precisely why I don’t want you charging in first.”
“And precisely why you need me to get to the control room fast. If they’ve got helmets, the only way to stop them from alerting the Feds is to go up and knock on their door.”
It was the same argument we had back at the headquarters of Julian’s Jacker Freedom Alliance while planning the operation. An argument Julian had lost when I convinced his twin sister, Anna—who was in charge of all JFA operations and more Attila the Hun than Julian would ever be—that my nascent ability to hyper-control my own mind meant we could take the plant with a low profile and minimum casualties the way Julian wanted.
“What if you’re not fast enough?” Julian asked.
I couldn’t exactly outrun a bullet in my hyped-up state, but it would be difficult to track me with a gun, especially if Hinckley and his men did their part and gave me some cover.
“You worry about your part of the op,” I said. “I’ll worry about mine.” I was part of the assault force, with Sasha and Julian bringing up the rear as the support team. As much as Julian seemed to worry about me, Sasha was more important to the operation. He was the only one who could scribe the workers, permanently rewriting their minds so they would be jacker sympathizers. But he needed to touch them to do it. “Just get Sasha up to the control room as fast as you can. I don’t want to go through all this for nothing.”
“What if your blowback hits before you’ve disabled the crew?”
He simply wasn’t giving up.
“Then make sure you’re not late.”
Julian sighed and looked like he was holding himself back. From a hug? More likely, he wanted to shake some sense into me. I closed my eyes and pretended to start the me
ditation routine that helped me enter my hyped-up state. I used to think that thoughts of inappropriate hugs were just a leftover from when Julian used his ability to “handle” my instincts—my mating instinct, to be precise—to make me fall in love with him for about ten seconds. That feeling kept surging back, days and weeks after we escaped from Agent Kestrel’s cells.
I thought maybe Julian had done something permanent to my brain.
Then I realized nearly everyone in the JFA had intense feelings when it came to Julian, and it wasn’t due to his handler abilities. He drew them in with the words he used, the things he did. He was setting up schools for the changelings we rescued, bringing the mindjacker clans together, creating a future for jackers seemingly out of thin air. Members of the JFA were fiercely loyal, every last one of us willing to die for him and the cause. I first noticed it in my fellow long-distance jacker and best friend, Ava—the shine in her eyes, the way her face turned radiant when she spoke about Julian. It looked a lot like love. My eyes probably shone when I looked at Julian too.
That didn’t mean we were in love with him.
Real love wasn’t just instinctual attraction or passionate loyalty to a charismatic leader. Real love was the way Ava gazed at her boyfriend Sasha, like she lived on the air he breathed. And Sasha looked at her like she was his reason to keep breathing. Being in love was something I used to have until a jacker named Molloy shredded the memories of my boyfriend Raf, leaving a hole in my heart that still whistled, cold and empty. Only a few things quieted the ache. Focusing on a mission. Shooting a target into oblivion at the practice range. Meditating myself into that hyper state where I could do impossible things.
I was jerked out of my ruminations by Julian tugging on my flak jacket. I pushed my combat helmet back off my forehead. My hair was getting long again, making it slide way too much. Julian avoided my stare as he tightened the straps of my jacket.
Any tighter and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. “Easy, boss. I’m pretty sure the bullets can’t sneak in the side.”
He pulled the strap one more time. “Be careful, keeper,” he said softly, then fixed his gaze on the door over my shoulder. Julian hadn’t called me keeper in a long time, not since I showed up on his doorstep, ready to join his revolution. Maybe he really was worried. The tug inside demanded my attention again, and I almost reached out to reassure him, but Hinckley’s hand signal saved me from it.
Hinckley pointed to Jameson, who had shifted in front of the door. The wisps of smoke from the acid had trailed to nothing, and the dawning sun glinted off the barrel of the battering ram as Jameson held it at the ready. Sasha stood slightly back from Julian, and in spite of the stone-cold look on Sasha’s face, his normally dark skin had paled to almost gray. Scribing twenty people was no small feat. His deep brown eyes used to seem empty to me, soulless, but now I knew they held more souls than he could count.
I brushed against his mindbarrier, and he let me in. Are you all right? His normal potpourri mindscent, a trace reminder from every soul he had ever scribed, was laced with a sour tinge of anxiety.
I will be. He gently nudged me out of his mind. I didn’t press back. He didn’t need me in his head, distracting him from the task ahead.
I closed my eyes again, needing to clear my mental decks for real this time. Julian’s sister, Anna, had helped train me in relaxation and meditation techniques, in between pushups and hand-to-hand close-combat drills. I imagined going down a mental elevator, floor by floor, slowly breathing in on the count and out on the pause. I quickly passed the thinking centers of my mind, sinking deeper to the parts that controlled heart rate and breathing. Below them were vast networks, like a mass of spaghetti, that orchestrated every function in my body. I was convinced that Sasha worked on this level most of the time, but I hadn’t figured out how he did his scribing thing. Yet.
Focus. Breathe in. Breathe out.
I searched for the thread I needed, the one that would change every muscle strand in my body from slow-twitch to fast. The ratio of fast- and slow-twitch muscles was set at birth, although athletes (illegally) used gene therapies to enhance it. What they took serums for, I could trigger with a simple thought. Which meant I could move, well, fast. Faster than should be humanly possible, even with gene therapy and a ton of training.
I would pay the price for it later.
I plucked the neural string that sent the signal. It zinged through my body, racing chemicals and rapid-fire electrical impulses to every muscle. They quivered with the sudden conversion to fast-twitch. I catapulted out of the depths of my brain, pumping up my adrenaline on the way. The conversion would last until I triggered a reversal, but the adrenaline boost would help my muscles handle the speed for longer.
I opened my eyes. Hinckley was waiting for my signal. I gave a shaky, jerking nod, clenching my jaw shut so my teeth wouldn’t rattle. My fingertips gripped the rough concrete wall, anchoring me until it was time. My entire body vibrated with the need to run, to purge this speed that was coiled in my muscles like electricity in a bottle.
Jameson slammed the door open with one loud bang of the battering ram, and it acted like a starter gun going off. My body broke loose and shot through the doorway like a bullet screaming from a sniper rifle. The adrenaline keyed up some senses—my peripheral vision and balance—and dimmed others, notably my hearing. I heard the smoke grenade chitter behind me and detonate, but then I moved into a cone of silence. The smoke was too slow to obscure my passage as I raced past two helmeted guards toward the stairwell on the far side of the room. Human reaction time was about two-tenths of a second—by the time they could move, I had already blurred across the floor.
I tore through the doorway and leaped up the metal-grated stairs, taking several steps with each bound. My senses slowed further, and I saw where each foot would fall right before it hit. Something shoved me in the back, making me over rotate and slam into the wall at the top of the stairs. I was going so fast, I literally bounced off. The recoil carried me to the next flight. I pivoted, my toes barely kissing the ground before I flew up the next set of stairs, no time to think about what had just happened.
Beats counted in my head. My heart was a slow drum roll tolling through my body and pounding out the seconds. One: in the building and up the first flight. Two: for the next three flights. Three: and I was at the top of the stairwell, on the third floor, hurtling through the door of the control room. Half a dozen middle-aged men in stiff-collared shirts stood by their screens, manipulating the mindware interfaces. One had a phone to his ear and a wild-eyed look. I ran straight into him, not slowing in the slightest.
He never saw me coming.
We fell together. His phone skittered across the floor and cracked against the wall. My momentum carried me over his head, and I flipped and landed on my back on the concrete floor. I bounced a couple of times before the energy of my body was spent, and I lay sprawled, face up on the floor. My muscles still full of fast-twitch action, I flipped over onto my hands and feet. The toes of my running shoes gained traction on the smooth floor, and I was ready to charge again, like a wild bull hyped on frothy anger. Which probably wasn’t far from the truth.
The downed power-plant worker lay motionless and the others gaped at us, stunned. They all had anti-jacker helmets. Six against one. Even a raging bull was going to have problems with that. I jerked up from the floor, pulled out my dart gun, and started shooting. I got four, but the last two came behind me and grabbed my shoulder and gun hand. My shot clattered against the screens. Anna’s close-combat training kicked in. I curled the gun in close to my chest, pulling the guy holding it forward, then drove my other elbow into the second guy’s body. He huffed stale coffee breath over my shoulder. I whipped that same elbow over his bent head and around to catch the first guy across the chin. His head flung to the side. The momentum of the strike rotated me out of his hold, and he staggered under the blow.
I shot them both at close range and they dropped at my feet.
I slowly lowered my weapon, quivering from head to toe. If they hadn’t been practically on top of me, I would have missed them. Footsteps clanged up the stairs, which my brain cycled through as strange. The steps didn’t make noise before, which meant my hearing was coming back. I aimed my gun at the door. My hand shook so badly that I actually missed Julian as he came through. He ducked, far too late, screeched to a stop, and held up his hands.
He watched me lower the gun, took in the bodies around me, then hurried into the control room. “Did you tranq them all?” He eyed the bodies as if he expected them to pop up off the floor.
I nodded in a jerky motion I hoped he would see was a yes. My lungs gasped for the oxygen they had neglected to use in the mere seconds I had taken to fly in here and disable the command center. I shook too much to speak, so I turned and gestured to the plant workers at my feet.
“What the—” Julian cursed behind me. I tried to turn, but he held my shoulder and dug into the back of my flak jacket. A dull throb of pain raced between my shoulder blades, and I wanted to ask what he was doing, but my brain was starting to cloud. I felt it coming: the blowback. The moment when all my muscles would scream their fatigue at once and lose the cohesion that allowed me to stay upright.
Julian turned me around and held out a small and coppery lump. It looked like a smashed bullet. “They shot you.”
His face turned darker than its normal creamy-brown color. I couldn’t answer him and wondered if he was mad at me, like it was somehow my fault that I got shot. I tried to work up a suitably sarcastic response, but the blackness rushed my brain all at once. My vision went first, and gravity pulled me through a vacuum of the senses, devoid of light and sound and feeling.
I had just one thought: I hoped Julian would catch me before I cracked my head on the cement floor.
Free Souls (Book Three of the Mindjack Trilogy) Page 1
