The swirling electric vortex sucked me deep and spun me around. My stomach lurched. If I hadn’t been jacking so strongly, I would have been stuck in that maelstrom in his mind, but I pushed through to the relatively calmer deep levels. I quickly hunted down the trigger for his adrenaline, dosed him, then hauled myself up out of his mind again. I barely made it out before the electrical storm could sweep me away.
I was panting, but so was Vellus, moaning and slowly coming out of his unconscious state. I cast my mind out, searching the floors below. Maybe the jackers from the assault team were there. I could let them know what I was trying to do; maybe they could help. There was nothing but helmets, some huddled on the bottom floor, some in the control room below us on the second floor. That meant either Kestrel had decided to wear a helmet, or he wasn’t here at all. And the JFA were either gone from the facility or they were dead.
I fought an empty weariness that threatened to pin me to the floor.
Vellus mumbled, then jerked in my arms. “Don’t!” I gripped him around the neck and he froze. I dropped my voice. “You’ve been knocked out. They’re watching us. We’re still following the plan.” He nodded, and I slowly released my hold on his neck. Together we eased up from the floor, my back flat against the wall, and Vellus’s body providing plenty of cover. He tried to say something, but his mouth wasn’t working yet, still garbled by the effects of the grenade.
“You!” I called to the third Guardsman. “Hiding behind the tube! Come out! You and your friends by the door are going to go back downstairs where you came from. The senator and I are taking a trip to the second floor.” I nudged Vellus forward, inching toward the open doorway of the room. “If you get too close, I’ll start shooting different parts of the senator’s body.”
We nearly stumbled over my dad’s inert form, and I desperately wanted to check if he was okay, but we had to keep moving. Who knew what would happen to my dad—or Sasha in the hydrocopter for that matter. I had just one mission, one goal, before a Guardsman managed to put a dart or a bullet in me: stop Kestrel.
The third Guardsman shuffled out of his hiding spot, hands held out, his weapon pointed at the ceiling. He backed toward the door and retreated into the hallway.
The stairs were only a short walk down the hall, and the control room was just one flight down. It felt like an impossible million exposed miles. There was nothing left to do but bluff my way there and hope I could keep the guardsmen in front of me.
Boots shuffled around the doorway, and the rifle tips disappeared. I heard them retreating down the hall. Once Vellus and I were over the threshold, we moved more quickly, with me tucked tightly behind him. The scraping of our shoes along the linoleum floor and my own labored breathing magnified a hundred-fold in my ears, but my mental reach told me the Guardsmen were adjusting their position, shifting backwards as we worked our way down the hall.
We made it to the stairs, but then Vellus’s legs tangled and he nearly went down. I sensed the Guardsmen shift forward again, encroaching up the stairwell toward us.
I quickly jacked into Vellus’s mind. Tell them to back off! His mindfield was still a dizzy vortex from the thought grenade, but less so. The adrenaline must be fighting off the effects, and it was more like linking in to the mind of a demens: nauseating, but tolerable.
“I promise you, she’ll kill me if you shoot!” Vellus clenched the railing with both hands to keep upright. We clambered down the steps, awkward in Vellus’s uncoordinated movements. By the time we reached the bottom, he was a little steadier. The Guardsmen had retreated to the hallway, the bare whisper of them talking into their com-links carrying over the stillness of the building, as if it were collectively holding its breath.
The control room was across the hall, halfway between our stairwell and the one where the Guardsmen were holding their position—the same stairwell I had marched up the day before, and that led to the ground level floor.
We edged out into the hallway, angling so I could see through the open door of the control room. My mental reach showed three figures inside—one pacing a narrow pattern, the other two holding stock still. They were around the corner of the door, out of sight. Four more helmets in the back office closest to the door were all unmoving. The windows into the office showed nobody inside, but as we crept closer, I saw several pairs of legs lying on the floor.
Bodies. I prayed they were no one I knew, while certain that they were.
One had a delicate, pale hand, palm up and unmoving on a fan of long blond hair. My view of her head was blocked by the angle of the doorway, but I recognized the cargo pants and the boots the size of a child’s.
Ava.
I had no time for the tears that her name welled up, so I swallowed them down. She was helmeted—it didn’t make any sense. Why would you helmet a dead body? Unless… unless they were alive, just unconscious. Helmeted to keep them from jacking.
I tried to beat back the hope that surged up in my chest. I didn’t have time for that either.
The pacing figure stopped. It was time to make our play. No sense waiting around for a trigger happy Guardsman to finally decide he had a good shot on me. Vellus and I shuffled to the threshold of the control room. The Guardsmen hovered at the top of the stairwell.
I clenched the back of Vellus’s shirt and linked in to his mind. I’m going to swing you into the control room with my back to the door frame, I thought. It’s got to be quick, or they might try to take a shot at me. Are you ready?
Ready.
I pulled out of his head before the dizziness got to be too much and quickly pivoted him into the control room. My back was now up against the propped open door, giving several inches thick of door and control room wall to protect my back from the Guardsmen, while Vellus’s tall frame covered my front.
I still held the gun to his head where everyone could see.
Our sudden entrance into the control room pulled the attention of the helmeted figures. I peered over Vellus’s shoulder, but I could only see two. One was a Guardsman, decked out in a flak jacket and with a rifle now pointed at my head.
The other was Kestrel.
He was ashen but alive. His face was lit with fury and a hyped-up tension that felt like a mirror of what was rippling through my own body. His Gman jacket was gone, and his starched shirt was rumpled, but I could see a corner of the bulletproof vest underneath.
Now I knew to aim for his head.
His attention was drawn to the manual interface board on the table in front of him where he was tapping. That’s when I noticed that his other hand held a gun, and it wasn’t pointed at me.
It was pointed at Julian’s head.
My breath caught in my throat. He’s alive. I reached out without thinking, but ran into the helmet on his head. He sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the corner of the table, his hands tied behind his back to the metal leg. His head hung down, tilted slightly away from the gun pressed to the back of his neck, and he appeared to be examining the tile floor in front of him. His flak jacket moved in and out with the breaths he drew in through his teeth.
I sucked in a shaky breath, which drew Julian’s gaze to mine. I saw the muscles in his arms flex as he tested the ties binding him. Color quickly darkened in his face. Kestrel pressed the gun harder, forcing Julian’s neck to bend down again.
“Patience, loverboy,” he said. “I don’t want to shoot you just yet.”
Kestrel’s icy voice sent shivers through me. If I was quick, and my aim was good, I might be able to shoot him. The Guardsman would probably shoot me in return, or maybe not, with the senator for hostage. But I didn’t know if I could do it, not with Kestrel’s gun to the back of Julian’s head. Besides, if Kestrel had already poisoned the water, it would be for nothing.
I scanned the screens behind him, filled with security images of the water plant, plus control panels and a large schematic of twisting blue lines. Two control panels were lit up green, and I remembered what Julian said about those: Kes
trel was flowing water to both Jackertown and the suburbs. For Kestrel, this had never been just about Jackertown. He wanted the inhibitors to reach jackers in the suburbs from the start. Kestrel’s steely blue gaze bore into me, as if his anti-jacker helmet and my hard head were no obstacle to the venom of his hate.
“I told the senator that you weren’t worth the trouble,” Kestrel said. “That you were far too dangerous.”
“Agent Kestrel—” Vellus said.
Kestrel cut him off. “She clearly has you under her control, Senator.” His gaze didn’t waver from me. “Something that will soon come to an end. Just remain calm, and everything will be fine.”
Kestrel’s hand flitted across the manual interface pad on the table in front of him. Then I saw it: an unfamiliar tension in Kestrel’s normally cool eyes. The twitch of his cheek. Those told me, as much as the screens behind him: he was buying time.
I jacked into the mindware interface of the controls, the metallic taste of the electronics stinging the back of my tongue as I searched for a way to stop whatever Kestrel was doing. Only I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I randomly flipped switches and pulled up controls, desperate to figure it out. I found a holding tank that Kestrel had set to drain. It was labeled chlorine, but it was disconnected from the main line that dispersed to the suburbs and Jackertown alike. I tried to shut it down, whatever it was, but my interference caused a display to pop up behind Kestrel. He was helmeted, so he couldn’t reach into the mindware to stop me.
Kestrel cursed and motioned to the Guardsmen holding a rifle pointed at my head. “Hit the manual override!” he barked out. The Guardsman hesitated, then with his gun still pointed at me, shuffled over to a gray metal panel next to the screens. My link to the mindware interface cut off abruptly. Kestrel stayed at his controls, jabbing in commands so hard the manual board jumped under his fingers.
Vellus was talking again. “Kestrel.” He sounded more like a senator now, more authority in his voice. “You need to stop. We can’t do this, not like we thought. We have to find another way to keep the peace.”
Kestrel’s face was turning purple from his frustration with the controls, but Vellus’s words whipped his gaze back to us. His eyes narrowed at Vellus, then he seemed distracted by something moving on the screens. His mouth fell open. Before I could figure out what he was looking at, he turned back.
Kestrel raised his gun from Julian’s head and fired at us.
Vellus was yanked sideways into the free space of the doorway. My grip on his shirt pulled me into the hall with him, and we fell together to the floor. A second shot rang out, and I ducked. I grabbed the front of Vellus’s shirt and wrestled him up to sitting, pulling him close to me for protection. I dragged us both away from the control room and braced my back against the wall just outside the door, hugging Vellus’s body for a shield. The Guardsmen at the end of the hall crept out from their spot at the top of the stairwell.
My gun wavered in their direction. “Stay back!” They tucked back into the stairwell, shielded from my shot.
Vellus’s head lolled to the side, and I struggled to keep his six foot plus frame upright, propped against me as I sat with my back against the wall.
Kestrel had shot Vellus.
I blinked as my mind wrapped around that idea. I blindly felt the front of Vellus’s shirt. It was slick with wetness, and my hand came away stamped red with blood. Then I saw it trickling down Vellus’s side to the floor, in a slow, hiccupping stream. I pressed my hand against his chest, searching for the hole where the bullet had gone in. I had no idea what I was doing, I just wanted to stop the pulsing of blood out of him. I pressed harder. Vellus’s breath came in small gasps.
He tried to turn his head to see me behind him. “It wasn’t supposed,” he stopped to gasp, “to be like this.”
Vellus’s body shuddered, and a sick feeling washed through me. Vellus was shot. Kestrel was poisoning the water and holding a gun to Julian’s head.
We weren’t going to make it after all.
I stared down the sight of my gun at the Guardsmen lurking by the stairwell.
“I was going to fix it, Kira,” Vellus whispered next to me. “I was going to fix everything.” Gasps pulled the air from his throat faster than the words could come out, making them fade at the end. Then his breath wheezed too softly to form sound. I linked in to his mind.
There were never supposed to be any readers. His thoughts were weak, and one thought-whisper echoed through his rapidly emptying mind. Accident. Then his body shook so badly I could feel it in my bones. His mind became a black hole, sucking me in. I yanked out before I was pulled into that empty space with him.
His body went still next to mine.
The echo of the emptiness of his mind reverberated through me, and my mind clung to his last thoughts. There were never supposed to be any readers. What did that mean? The first mindreaders were triggered by left-over pharmaceuticals in the water, but it wasn’t an accident. More like an environmental disaster that caught us by surprise.
I didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. In the end, I hadn’t been the one to kill Vellus after all. Even more stunning, I didn’t actually want him to die. He took with him any chance of stopping his friends in the Senate from using their military option to solve the “jacker problem” once and for all. The Feds would find some excuse—maybe even Vellus’s death—to attack Jackertown. They could wipe it out with one fast bombing run. It wouldn’t take much to kill us. No matter how strong our minds, they were nothing against bombs and bullets.
Maybe Kestrel, with his plan to poison jackers with his inhibitors, would be able to stop the Feds from outright killing everyone. Maybe jackers would all end up in Vellus’s Detention Center, but at least they would be alive.
My gun hand wavered, still pointing at the Guardsmen on the stairs. Despair was a weight dragging on my arm, wanting me to put the gun down. Give up before the Guardsmen decided it was safe to shoot me. Maybe giving up would save Julian too. My head seemed to float above my body, and a fuzzy fatigue pulled on my eyelids.
Popping sounds, like fireworks on the fourth of July, went off in the distance.
I blinked my eyes open. The blood leaking out of Vellus was spreading across the floor by my knee. It had slowed to a small, ebbing ooze, presumably because his heart had stopped forcing it to flee from his body. The fireworks cracked again, a rapid string of them, and a thought flitted through my mind that they were somehow connected. Vellus was dead, and the fireworks were celebrating it. Only it was a macabre dance of sounds that were wrong, shifted in time and purpose from where they really belonged.
Shouts, closer now, snapped me out of my fugue.
Someone was downstairs. And they were making a real ruckus. The Guardsmen had disappeared from the top of the stairs, drawn to whatever was happening on the first floor. A scuffle of steps, grunts, and the pop-whoosh sound of dart guns came from downstairs.
Dart guns!
I flung my mental reach to the ground floor only to find a tight squad of jackers working their way up the stairwell. I swept them quickly—Anna and three of Hinckley’s military converts—then pushed a sweep to the rest of the floor and the grounds outside. Anna had brought dozens of jackers with her, and they were everywhere, swarming the street and running between the stationary helmets of the Guardsmen. She arrived at the top of the stairs and did a quick peek check around the corner.
Her eyes went wide when she saw me. I finally let my gun arm drop and relaxed my grip on Vellus’s body. The three bulky jackers behind her fanned out to cover the hallway. I waved to Anna with my free hand, not remembering it was covered in blood until her gaze fixated on it. She slowly shuffled down the hall, making sweeps with her rifle. Then someone else peeked around the corner of the stairwell—possibly the last person I expected to see.
“Mom?” Dressed in a flak jacket and JFA gear with her gray hair tied back under her combat helmet, she looked like a strange mixture of PTA mom and revolut
ionary. The flood of relief I had at seeing her alive was overpowered by a pulse of anger that Anna had brought my mom on an op.
“What in the world, Anna?” I asked, my voice low, when she crouched next to me.
“Your mother insisted on coming,” Anna whispered, pointing with her rifle over my shoulder to the open door. “Is the control room secure? I sense helmets, but they’re not moving.”
I shook my head. “Kestrel’s in there with a Guardsman,” I whispered back. “He’s poisoning the water. I tried to stop him, but he’s got Julian. The other helmets are captured JFA, but they’re all out. My dad’s on the third floor, and Sasha’s on the roof. They need help, but we need to stop Kestrel, or at least not let him escape, but don’t kill him—he’s the only one who has the antidote.”
She nodded and signaled two of her jackers. They stole on silent boots toward the door of the control room. The third stayed back by my mom, who started shuffling toward me, so I motioned her back and quickly linked in to her head. She pushed me back out.
She… pushed me back out.
My mouth hung open. A sly smile crept up on my mom’s face as I brushed her mindbarrier—it was soft like a changeling’s but firmer than a mindreader’s. This time she let me in.
Mom, you… you’re… what the…?
I changed, Kira. When the Fronters attacked you, I don’t know, it was like something was triggered inside me. Of course, I couldn’t help you because they had those helmets on. Xander convinced them that I had been tested and was a mindreader—
“I would be happy to put a bullet in your brother, Ms. Navarro,” Kestrel’s voice cut through my mom’s thoughts. “So, I wouldn’t come any closer if I were you.” Anna and her two jackers stood in front of the control room, their rifles pointed inside, holding perfectly still. I struggled out from under Vellus’s body and up from the floor, leaving a bloody smear on the wall as I tried to keep the room from tilting under me. I stumbled toward the door and edged up to the corner.
Free Souls (Book Three of the Mindjack Trilogy) Page 21
