Free Souls (Book Three of the Mindjack Trilogy)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  Ava and I camped out on the roof, our yoga mats laid side by side. We faced each other, cross-legged, as though we were about to meditate. Which was partially true.

  I slowly twisted myself into a lotus position, rotating my hips like Ava had taught me until I reached it. Every muscle in my body ached, even the ones behind my ears, between my toes, and tiny, screaming muscles in the crooks of my arms that I didn’t know existed. I had tortured them into superhuman feats in the assault on the power station this morning, and now they were paying me back.

  It was totally worth it.

  The mission was a success. Sasha scribed all twenty-three employees of the Crawford power plant into being jacker sympathizers who would never turn the lights out on Jackertown, no matter who ordered it. We left a JFA member behind as an undercover staff member and even repaired the door on our way back out. Well, someone did, probably Sasha, given his handiness with a welder and distaste for broken things. I was passed out from the blowback and they had to carry me home. At least I had managed to keep the mission covert. Even Julian acknowledged as much. When I woke up a couple of hours later, sprawled on my bunk in the converted door factory that still served as the JFA headquarters, he was by my side. He had resumed the normal calm and attentive demeanor that made everyone love him, leaving me no chance to formulate a witty jab about him being mad at me for getting shot.

  I relaxed into the lotus pose, stretching the muscle strain out of my body, but I couldn’t help wincing as the bruise from the bullet moaned its complaint. Julian’s worries weren’t entirely unfounded. It was a good thing I had been wearing a flak jacket.

  “How are you feeling?” Ava asked. Her rail-thin body seemed to be holding her lotus position effortlessly.

  “Like I’ve been run over by a tank,” I said. “With a couple kidney punches for good measure.”

  She nodded. A tuft of her long, blond hair lifted with the breeze and she tucked it back. My ultralite coat warded off the cold wind that gusted up from the streets of Jackertown below and brought the tempting smell of bacon from someone’s late-morning breakfast. My stomach grumbled, even though I had already fed it a huge post-blowback meal.

  Ava’s gaze drifted to my upper left arm where my jacket covered a giant purplish bruise, another souvenir from the mission. The momentum of the bullet had shoved me into the wall, giving me two bruises for the price of one.

  “We don’t have to do this now, Kira,” Ava said. “We can try again tomorrow.”

  “No, no, I was just whining. I’m fine.”

  She dipped her chin to peer at me. Her normally soft blue eyes were sharp with skepticism, and it clashed with the graceful lotus pose she held.

  “Really,” I said. I didn’t want her to back out of our search today. We’d already had to skip a couple of days to prep for the mission and every day I wasn’t looking for Kestrel was a day further away from killing him.

  The war had begun in earnest four months ago, when Julian finally got his chance to blow up the gate to Agent Kestrel’s secret facility and rescue the changelings Kestrel tormented there. Julian’s Jacker Freedom Alliance had been born on that day—we liberated hundreds of jackers and swelled the ranks of the JFA overnight, bringing all the clans of Jackertown together—but Kestrel had slipped away again.

  Ever since then, I had been honing my jacking skills and marksmanship, imagining a hundred different ways I could kill him. Way #13: a long mindjacked walk off Navy Pier. Way #65: death by choking on his own spit from cyanide poisoning. Way #52: slow death by asphyxiation from a blow to the Adam’s apple. It was probably wrong to have that one be my favorite, but I didn’t care. One way or another, when the time came, I would be ready.

  And Kestrel would finally be dead.

  “We’ll keep our search short today, okay?” I said, trying to smile away Ava’s concern. “Only a few sweeps and then we’ll try again tomorrow.”

  Ava nodded her acceptance of my compromise. We both closed our eyes. I had to dive into my mind to do my part, and she needed to calm hers to allow me in.

  Early on, when I had managed to fight off Kestrel’s tranquilizer by ramping up my heart rate, I discovered I could manipulate my own mind. But I really had no idea of the depth of that ability. Over the last four months, I had explored and strengthened it. I was still finding new skills, but the most useful discovery was one of the first. When Kestrel wanted jackers hyped up to the fullest expression of their abilities in his experiments, he used jacker-specific adrenaline to boost them. It was the same stuff Julian had in his med-patches. I could trigger its production in my own body by following a particular neural pathway, like a street map that pointed the way to the Shot of Adrenaline department in my mind. I had used it before to amp up my endurance when I was SuperFastGirl.

  And I could do it for other jackers, too.

  I slowly breathed in and out, concentrating as I hunted down the right neural spot and dosed myself with a little adrenaline to help with the search. The chemical coursed through my body and eased some of the achiness of this morning’s mission, but I wouldn’t push it too much—one blowback per twenty-four hours was plenty.

  Ava couldn’t jack into my head—no one could, at least no one so far had been successful—but I could reach into hers. Ava’s mindbarrier was weak, easy to push through, but I took care to be gentle. Her strawberry mindscent lingered at the back of my throat as I repeated the steps, finding her adrenaline release center and dosing her, only stronger. Outwardly, the two of us were the picture of a couple of Buddhist monks, calmly holding the lotus position on our mats. Inwardly, the quiver of excess adrenaline shook my too-full stomach, and Ava had to be feeling it even more strongly. Soon we would look more like junkies hyped up on some kind of psychedelic drug.

  A small price for the possibility of finding Kestrel.

  My unenhanced reach was at most a few thousand feet, double that with an adrenaline dose, but even unenhanced, Ava could reach for tens of miles. Enhanced, she could touch Wisconsin, a hundred miles away. When I synced my abilities with hers, our reach was… well, we hadn’t exactly tested the limits. We had tried to pay a visit to Senator Vellus—mindreading politician and the country’s most avowed hater of jackers—in his office in Springfield, two hundred miles from Chicago. We hadn’t made it past the mindwave disruptor shield surrounding the capitol building, but it had been fun to try.

  Syncing my mindfield with Ava’s was tricky. There was a natural resistance when one jacker mind encountered another: the strong could invade the weak, or two minds of equal strength might fight, like oil wrestling with vinegar. But merging was a foreign idea.

  Are you ready? I asked Ava, wanting to be sure.

  Don’t tax yourself, Kira. But yes, I’m ready.

  I was more worried about taxing her. Her jacking skills were almost nonexistent, but when we synced, my jacking ability carried over. It seemed to be rough on her, leaving her already too-thin body drained of its normal spark.

  I slowly eased our minds outside the confines of Ava’s head and toward the street. Everyday life rambled below us. Changelings played while on break from their lessons and training sessions. Contractors traded mindjack favors between the Clans, respecting Julian’s ban on trafficking with mindreaders. JFA patrols neglected their duties at the perimeter of Jackertown, curling smoke from their cigarettes and chatting instead.

  I pulled Ava’s mindfield along, reaching for one of the minds below. We needed something to focus on to sync up our mindfields properly before casting out for the larger search. I heard Ava pull in a long breath and let it out slow. Her mind relaxed, and the moment we synced, a tremor rippled through my body.

  Ready? Ready? Our thoughts vibrated together.

  Let’s go. Let’s go.

  We reached past the edge of Jackertown, skipping over the vast ring of abandoned brownstones and businesses that comprised a buffer zone of sorts between downtown, where mindreaders still commuted to work, and the suburbs where they lived.
A hundred years ago, before the change, this part of the city was a vibrant mix of people living in stacked apartment complexes along bustling train lines. Then all our leftover medications, flushed into the water and forgotten, brewed into something new: a cocktail that triggered a change in our brains. The world quickly filled with mindreaders, and that was when the depopulation started. Mindreaders could tolerate the close quarters of skyscrapers for work and play, but no one wanted to hear their neighbor’s thoughts in their sleep. People fled to the wide-open spaces of the suburbs, and much of the city was abandoned to the demens, people driven mad by the adolescent change into mindreaders.

  Dipping into the minds of the demens was dizzying at best and gut-wrenching at worst, so we took care to avoid them. We normally started our spiraling search for shield-protected facilities in downtown Chicago. Some important government buildings had them, like the mayor’s office, but we were looking for something out of place, like Kestrel’s secret facility we had destroyed over the summer. Of course, we would love to find Kestrel himself, but our luck wasn’t the kind that would drop him into our laps without a helmet. But finding a shield-protected facility where it didn’t belong was a step in the right direction.

  A cluster of helmeted minds on the move caught our notice. We scanned the un-helmeted minds nearby for information—the entourage was Senator Vellus’s. What was the senator doing in Chicago? He spent most of his time in the capitol building in Springfield, when he wasn’t working the Senate floor in Washington DC, promoting his anti-jacker agenda.

  My eyes popped open to look at Ava. The surprise registered on her face as well, but her eyes remained closed, holding tight onto our mental merge. I closed my eyes again, careful not to break our link.

  Can we take Vellus? Maybe jack a passerby to go after him? No, they’re too well guarded, plus they’re on the move. Our synced thoughts twined around each other, asking and answering our own questions. Let’s follow them for a while. See where he’s going. Maybe he’ll take off his helmet—

  “Meditation on the roof?” Anna’s voice broke into our thoughts, snapping our mind sync apart. “Isn’t it a little cold for that?” Breaking the connection meant we couldn’t reach as far we could on our own, especially me. My mindfield whipped back to my head like an overstretched rubber band, adding mental soreness to the physical fatigue that still prodded my body with dull sticks of pain.

  I cracked open my eyes to look up at Julian’s sister, the glare of the morning sun making me squint. Anna towered over us with her fists on her hips. Her straight hair hung to her shoulders like a sheet of black rain. She had the same creamy-brown skin and intense blue eyes as her twin brother, Julian, but while Julian’s face was usually warm and inviting (unless he was mad at me), Anna’s was almost always drawn as sharp as the knives she liked to throw in our training area downstairs.

  “There are usually less interruptions up here,” I said, which was as much as I could complain about it. Anna didn’t know that Ava and I were searching for Kestrel. No one did, not even Julian. It was my own private obsession. One that Ava indulged me in because she was mesh that way. She understood how much it fed and quieted the aching hole left inside me from losing Raf. I knew she pitied me from the time I spent in her mind, but it was in a kindhearted way. I understood why Sasha loved her so deeply.

  Ava did the searches not to find Kestrel, but to help me.

  Anna wouldn’t understand, and Julian… well, I didn’t want him to think I had gone demens. He trusted me, confided in me. Hinckley was his second-in-command, but I was his friend-in-chief. If he knew I was obsessing over Kestrel, he would worry, and he already did too much of that.

  “Sorry to interrupt.” Anna glanced at Ava, then back to me. “Kira, can we talk?”

  Anna and I both had impenetrable minds, which meant I couldn’t just link in to her head to make this discussion private. And Anna wasn’t much of a “talker,” so this must be important. I frowned an apology to Ava, who smiled brightly and climbed off her mat. She rolled it up and tucked it under her arm, then glided in that light-stepped way of hers to the stairwell. I unfolded gingerly from my lotus pose, stood, and took my time rolling my mat, waiting until Ava was out of earshot.

  The stairwell door slowly swung shut. “What’s up?” I asked Anna, searching for something I had done to make her angry, but coming up empty. She had been in favor of my part in the mission, and it had gone well.

  “Kira, I want to take you off mission duty.” Anna’s face was the picture of a commander in control, yet her tone had an unusual softness underneath.

  “What?” Fear gripped my vocal chords and hiked up my voice. I needed to be in operations the way I needed to search for Kestrel. “Why? Because of the blowback? I’m fine, really. It’s not that big of a deal, but if you want, next time I won’t push so hard.”

  “It’s not that.” She shifted from foot to foot and studied the broken pebbles on the concrete rooftop as if the words she was searching for were hidden in the random pattern of stones. Which made no sense. No one made Anna uncomfortable, least of all me.

  She finally looked back to me. “You would better serve the cause on the political side of things.”

  Suddenly it became clear. “Not you too!” From the moment I joined the JFA, Julian had wanted me on his weekly political talks, which sent waves of revolution rippling across the chat-casts. He urged jackers around the country to join us, successfully building the population of Jackertown to nearly three thousand. I was fully on board with Julian’s revolution, but joining his PR campaign was the last thing I wanted to do.

  Anna was a good three inches taller than me and could probably take me in a fight, even if I were hyped up on fast-twitch. But there was no way she was taking me off ops, least of all to do Julian’s chat-casts.

  I glared up at her. “I belong on ops, Anna. You know it. Remember last week? With the Fronters?” The Readers’ First Front made more incursions all the time into Jackertown. Their propaganda accused us of everything from baby-stealing to animal worship, and they liked to haul off unsuspecting jackers for their vigilante justice. “If I hadn’t been there, scouting beyond the perimeter, we would have lost someone. Probably several someones, just like last month, when they took an entire patrol near the perimeter.” That one had hit everyone hard. I jabbed a finger at Anna’s camouflage ultralite. “I’ve got skills the JFA needs right now. You know it’s true. You need me on ops.”

  “I’m not saying your skills aren’t… useful.” Her face drew tight, like she was forcing the words out. Then her voice became even softer, so unlike her that it made my heart race. “I know you want to do ops, but we don’t always get to do what we want, Kira. Sometimes we have to do what’s needed of us. Although, for you…” She paused, like this part was especially difficult for her to say. “…it’s a little more complicated.”

  “What are you talking about?” Now I was genuinely confused. “I would do anything for the JFA!”

  “I know,” she said. “I know you would. It’s just that Julian thinks it’s important that you shouldn’t be on ops. And what he thinks matters.” She paused as if this was a grand revelation and not something Julian and I had been quarreling over for months.

  “I would do anything for Julian.” I said it flatly, daring her to contradict me.

  She didn’t say anything, just shook her head, then ran both hands through her hair, leaving it mussed. Normally, Anna was about as subtle as a right hook. Reading her wasn’t difficult, and she didn’t try to make it so. But today she was a thousand crossed signals that made my head hurt. Or maybe I was still recovering from the blowback. That was possible.

  “Julian is important, Kira,” Anna said finally, her voice falling into her familiar command mode, as if Julian were an objective we were going to reach by deploying all our assets. “He’s more important than any of us. Jackers will listen to me, they’ll carry out my orders, but they follow Julian. Do you understand? He’s the heart of the JFA,
and we can’t have anything messing that up. We can’t have him distracted by things that aren’t central to the cause. He needs to keep his focus.”

  “So what are you saying?” I said. “That I need to go on Julian’s chat-casts because we can’t have him worrying about me on ops?” My chest tightened and triggered a strange light-headed feeling. I couldn’t help it if Julian worried about things he shouldn’t. The op had gone fine, and I had been right after all—the plant worker would have called in the assault if I hadn’t reached him in time. It was stupid for me not to be on ops, and it was dangerous to go on the chat-casts. Julian wanted me to be something that I couldn’t. That I wouldn’t, not if it endangered the people I loved.

  Anna bit her lip and stared out over Jackertown, avoiding my question.

  “Anna.” I took a breath, trying to calm the panic-fueled storm brewing inside me. I had to appeal to her rational side—that was where Anna operated ninety percent of the time. I could reach her there. “I can’t go public the way Julian wants me to. Vellus is just waiting for me to pop up on his radar screen again. The only thing keeping my family safe is that, as far as Vellus knows, I’m long gone.”

  “He has to know you’re here, Kira.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “He’s probably watching my family to see if I go back home, but so far, he hasn’t made a move against them. I want to keep it that way. If I’m splashed all over the casts, Vellus will use my family to flush me out. I would be forced to leave the JFA and go to ground for real. Forced. I won’t put them in danger again.” I hadn’t spoken to my dad since I left—just scrit Xander every once in a while to check on them. I was afraid Vellus might go after Raf, too. Even though Raf hated me now, as far as Vellus knew, I still cared for him.

  “We could send a few JFA members to protect them,” she offered.

  “A couple extra jackers?” I asked. “Against the entire federal government?” This was the same argument I’d had a million times with Julian.