by Elle Casey
My heart rate kicks into overdrive. I jack into the mindware interface on the screen and rewind the program. The metallic taste of the interface tastes especially bitter as I search for more details. I freeze the tru-cast when it pops up an image of two FBI agents, guns pointed at the camera, which shakes slightly, like it’s a handheld. The Feds are in what looks like a hospital lobby, and the words scrolling along the bottom obviously don’t belong to them. Someone else’s words are narrating the image.
It’s like the old days when the first readers were discovered, the text is saying. My mind is whirling. Did somebody out mindjackers on camera? Who would do that? What jacker in their right mind would expose themselves, not to mention the rest of us? As if in answer to that question, the camera swings to show the face of the girl holding it. It must be the camera on her phone. The text identifies her as Kira Moore, but she looks a lot like Tessa—pale skin, pink in the cheeks, long brown hair, only this Kira girl has blue eyes that are blazing in anger. She shifts the camera to capture a bunch of kids in hospital gowns sprawled on the floor behind her, fighting with guards of some kind.
I was kidnapped by the FBI, the text along the bottom is saying, brought here, and then sent to a prison with hundreds of other kids just like me. For no other reason than who I am.
I mentally nudge the screen to stop. I don’t need to see any more. My brain is stunned into a kind of suspended animation, where everything slows down, all sound disappears, and there are only my thoughts banging around inside my head.
This girl just told the world about us. The world. Now everyone knows we exist. From now on, everyone will look slant-eyed at their neighbors, wondering if they’re jackers. In one, brief, clarifying moment, I can see it all unfolding: neighbors turn us into the FBI, who lock us up. Mobs of frightened readers demand the police root us out and hunt us down. Then the experiments begin. The torture. The fight to figure out what we are, so they can stop us. So readers can feel safe again. It’s everything every jacker has been afraid of since the moment we first knew what we were.
How dare this girl put everyone in danger by revealing us to the world?
I slowly hand the screen back to Marshall. My hand is shaking a little, so I make a fist of it to keep it still.
“This girl,” I say, my voice thick. “She’s part of Clan Molloy?”
“That’s right,” Marshall says. “At least, we think so. They were all taken down at once, and no one’s seen them since. But this girl on the national tru-cast? Her school is in Clan Molloy territory.”
“What about this one?” I ask, gesturing to the kid in the chair. He’s still shaking, but he’s gone pale now as well. “Is he part of the Clan?”
“Same territory.”
I frown at him. “What’s he say about it?”
“That’s what we want to know,” Marshall says. “He’s not a keeper, but he’s got a pretty hard head. I want you to crack it open, so we can see what’s inside.”
My stomach twists so bad I nearly gag.
I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that this Kira girl has outed mindjackers to the entire world, making my life, and every jacker’s life, a lot more dangerous. As if it weren’t dangerous enough. And now… Marshall wants me to unlock this kid.
It’s bad enough when I lock someone down—but that’s nothing compared to unlocking them. The brain resists it. Hard. The jackers who come back to be unlocked tell me it feels like I’m literally cracking open their skull with a claw hammer. At least they signed up for it voluntarily. Some opt out and decide to just stay locked. But for the ones where it’s involuntary… Marshall’s only asked me once to unlock a mind that didn’t want to be unlocked. And that was because he was going to drill inside it with five of his friends.
That’s the kind of thing that leaves a person with just pieces of a mind afterward.
I stare at the kid. His eyes are like those oversized ones in Tessa’s picture. The one where she’s being tormented by the other readers, because they’re just plain evil. Only now I’m the one who’s going to do that… and this kid isn’t going to survive to draw pictures about it later to remind himself how strong he is.
He’ll be lucky to survive it at all.
I nod to Marshall and take a seat in front of the kid. But I know, deep in my gut, I can’t do this. My heart wants to pound up through my temples and out of my head. I have a sick, dizzy feeling, like things are spinning out of control around me. I take a shuddering breath and try to tick through what I know. Just the facts.
The world knows about mindjackers now.
I’m a mindjacker.
My family is not.
This kid is going to die if I unlock him.
Marshall is a thug and a jacker.
Marshall knows where my family lives.
If I walk away from this, I’m on my own.
Being on my own just got a lot more dangerous.
They’re like pieces of a puzzle. The contours of the moon, ridges and valleys, dips and peaks, all fitting together to make one contiguous whole… I just have to shift it around, change the pieces, smooth out the bumps, until the tumblers click into place… and it will all make sense again.
Marshall’s waiting for me. Jackson and another of his thugs have come over to watch, presumably because they’ll be drilling through the kid’s mind. Three adults against one kid, plus me, the locksmith to break him open. The kid is about to pass out, he’s hyperventilating so badly.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, like I’m preparing to do the job. I reach out and lightly brush every jacker mind in the room. They don’t notice. This is another thing I’ve kept in my back pocket: the fact that I can brush minds undetected. I’ve been saving it for a rainy day, and the end of times for mindjackers qualifies as a pretty bad day. I lightly touch every mind, so I know where they all are. My mind field is spread thin among them, touching them lightly, mapping their contours, taking their unique measurements. When I’ve got them all figured out, every one of the twenty-three in the warehouse and the one outside the door…
I start locking them all.
The screams are deafening. I jerk up from the chair at the same time I open my eyes. The kid has fallen off his chair, and he’s shaking so bad on the floor, it’s like he’s having an epileptic fit. But he’s small, so I grab his arm and hoist him up from the ground. I step over Marshall’s writhing body on the floor and haul the kid across the expanse of the warehouse as fast as I can. As soon as he gets his feet under him, I dig out my phone. I’m hailing an autocab before we even reach the door. We push past the fallen jacker guard outside and keep going. I’ll only be able to hold the lock while I’m in range of the warehouse, which means about a hundred feet or so. I go to the very edge of my range, hand still gripping the arm of the kid because I’m afraid he’ll panic and run, and I wait for the autocab.
It takes a really long time. Probably a full thirty seconds.
Marshall’s going to be so pissed.
As soon as the autocab arrives, I shove the kid in, climb in after him, and release everyone in the warehouse. They’ll have migraines for a day, but I haven’t locked them. Just spun their tumblers for a while; they’ll go back to the original maps. I hope. I did it all by feel, and sweet mercy, I’ve never done anything like this before.
I hope I haven’t done something awful, something… different… like I did with Sarah.
I can’t worry about that now.
Now, my only concern is how to stay alive.
Chapter Five
I drop the kid off at his house. I tell him he should watch out for Marshall—that he’s going to come looking for us both. It would be better if the kid wasn’t there when Marshall showed up. The kid says he’s going to tell his parents he’s a jacker, and I hope he does. And that it works out. But I can’t worry about that now.
At home, Livvy’s done playing her game. When I stride into the living room, she’s hanging her head off the couch, reading something on
her screen.
“Hey, Zeph,” she says, looking at me upside down. “You’re back.”
I choke up, and there’s a pain in my chest that’s making it hard to breathe, so I just nod and head upstairs. I have to pack before my parents get home.
My room’s a mess. Clothes everywhere, my sheets spilling half on the floor, bits of a toy hydrocar I took apart a million years ago and never put back together piled up in the corner. I grab my backpack, dump out my scribepad, and stuff in a few changes of clothes. I grab a photo frame that’s always scrolling through old pictures. I haven’t updated it in forever. It goes in with the one hoodie I own that doesn’t have Fremd across the chest.
Because I can’t have anyone tracing me back to here.
I grab the stash of unos, and I’ve still got Marshall’s tally card. That should get me to Wisconsin. Then I can jack my way from there. The pain in my chest is reaching critical by the time I come back downstairs. I can’t afford to say goodbye to my folks. I’d have to jack them to let me go, and I don’t think I could take doing that right now. They’ll figure out what happened once they watch the news.
Not least because I’m going to tell Olivia.
I stand at the threshold to the living room, just watching her play some game on her tablet. I wait until she notices me.
She rolls up to sitting the normal way. “Hey, are you making dinner tonight? Or are we waiting for Mom and Dad?”
I swallow down the lump in my throat. “You’ll have to wait for Mom and Dad today, champ. I’m taking off.”
“Again? I thought you were back.” She gives me a cockeyed look, but she’s not terribly concerned.
I shuffle over and sit on the edge of the couch, just on the arm. I want to hug her goodbye, but I don’t think I can. Not and actually make it out the door.
“Livvy?” I start, then choke up again.
She sets down her tablet and sits at attention. “Yeah?” She’s wary now, like she knows something’s up, just not exactly what.
“I’m leaving.”
“I know.”
“I’m not coming back.”
She just blinks, looking at me like I’ve gone demens right in front of her. “Huh?”
“Have you seen the news today?”
She shrugs. Livvy doesn’t really watch the news. I know this.
“When you watch it, you’ll know why I have to leave.”
She glances at the wall screen, but it’s turned off. “What, did you like rob a bank or something?”
I smile. A small laugh works its way past the lump in my throat. I decide I want to hug her after all, so I do. Halfway through the hug, I think she figures out I’m serious, because she’s not letting go of me.
“Livvy, I gotta go,” I say, ducking my head and wrenching away from her.
“But… I don’t want you to go.”
I nod, blinking so I can see while I’m backing away. “Someday I’ll come back.”
She has this panicked and confused look on her face.
That’s more than I can take, so I turn and practically run out of the house. I hail an autocab with my phone by feel because I can’t really see anything through my blurred vision. I’ll take the autocab a few towns over, get out of the suburbs, then catch a train. Go as far as the unos will take me. Then I’ll have to think about how to make it in the world as a reader. I’ll have to forge some papers or jack someone into doing it for me. Find a job or jack my way into that. It’ll be tricky to avoid the Clans, but they’ll likely be lying low as well. I’ll have to be constantly on my guard until I can establish a new identity, build some trust, have a cover that works as well as being just a regular mindreading kid in a high school full of mindreaders.
Because there’s one thing I know for sure: the world isn’t ready for mindjackers.
Not yet. And probably not ever.
They’ll hunt down every last one of us, and the only ones who’ll survive will be the ones who are best at blending in. Being a locksmith won’t keep me alive, but being invisible might.
Once I’m in the autocab with the path programmed in, I do the one last thing that will give me half a chance to survive in this new world where mindjackers are no longer hidden. Where Clans are going to be fighting each other or on the run or hunted down. I’ll need all my jacking skills to be able to pass for a reader, but there’s one thing I’ll need to protect myself from the worst jackers out there: a mind so hard no one can breach it.
I take a deep breath.
I grip the seat of the autocab.
And I lock myself.
No one can hear my screams as the autocab carries me away.
A Word from Susan Kaye Quinn
The Mindjack Trilogy is a story about a world where everyone reads minds, except one girl… who then learns she can control them instead. When I finished the trilogy in 2012, I thought I was done—three novels and three novellas seemed like nice round numbers. I knew for sure Kira’s story had been told, and at the time, there was no other Mindjack character I felt could compete with the Girl Who Changed The World.
And then Zeph came along and unlocked my mind.
It started with a simple request from Samuel Peralta. “Hey Susan, why don’t you write a story for our telepath anthology?”
Telepaths… I might have a few thoughts about those kinds of characters.
The seeds were already sown to write more Mindjack stories—Keeper, a short Mindjack novella, was written more than a year after the trilogy was “done.” And I envision two more novellas, Warrior and Viewer, coming soon, but those are all Mindjack Origins stories—they throw light on the shadowy corners of character backstory that couldn’t be covered in the main books. I had yet to dream up a character who would fit into the world after Mindjack: a world where peace came at the price of unsettling change, and the push of a reset button had wholly transformed the landscape. Any story that came after Mindjack would require a whole new cast of characters. The Telepath Chronicles seemed the perfect opportunity to explore something that was completely new within the Mindjack universe, but which might yet be able to carry forward into that altered landscape.
With that nudge, Zeph and his locksmith power came into being. I purposely wrote my piece for this collection as Zeph’s origin story—this is where he came from before Kira changed the world of mindjackers and mindreaders forever. I won’t be writing the rest of Zeph’s story until (at least) 2016, but as soon as I envisioned Zeph’s ability, I knew it had the power to change the world again… and that made his story worth writing.
(I’m thinking the Mindjack Trilogy may need to be renamed the Mindjack Saga.)
If you haven’t read Mindjack, Zeph’s story gives you a taste of what that world is like. It might even be a little spoilerish for the first book, but just hold still while I wipe those memories from your mind, so you can venture forth fresh and unbiased into Kira’s world. When you pick up Open Minds (it’s free!), you won’t find Zeph there. He’s waiting for Kira to finish her story before he begins to tell his. I hope this taste will be enough to tide you over until I write the rest of it.
Like Zeph’s story, most of my works delve into the science of the mind (and the heart): from controlling minds (Mindjack) to collecting life energy debts (Debt Collector) to the intersection of technology and tradition in a retro past (The Dharian Affairs). I like to pose social-moral questions that leave just enough wiggle room for my readers to ask, what would I do? If that sounds like fun, you can try the first in each of these series for free. If you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get a free short story as well, but more importantly: you’ll be the first to know when I launch my new Singularity series in 2015. This is my take on the coming time when humanity is finally forced to stare machines in the face… and to discover what we’re truly made of. Stop by Facebook and tell me to get back to writing or the Robot Overlords will be here before I get the books published. Special hugs and telepathic kisses to all the readers of the Mindjack series over t
he years—you are the people who set my writing career in motion, and I’ll forever be grateful for that.
Trauma Room
by Samuel Peralta
I’m ushered into the trauma room two minutes after the senator’s been wheeled in, twenty minutes after the shooting.
The room is small, square, twenty feet to a side, filled with men in suits, men wearing dark glasses, men with wireless receivers tucked behind their ears. They ring around the doctors and nurses surrounding a gurney at the far end. In one corner of the room an auburn-haired woman is sitting, comforting a sobbing boy, her lips mouthing a name and the words I love you over and over. The blue of her suit is stained with swatches of lavender: her husband’s blood. Her face is grim.
I clutch my shoulder, the pain still flashing from one of the bullets that wasn’t meant for me. “I can’t do this,” I say. “No one’s ever done it before, breached a dead man.”
“He’s not dead yet,” says the colonel.
I move closer, see that blood is still flowing from a gaping wound in his temple. One doctor has the patient’s head in his hands, steadying it, as the others begin an incision into the throat, a tracheotomy. Another attendant watches as fluids level through an intravenous tube into his left upper arm. A monitor counts time with a rhythmic, oscillatory trace, faint and fading.
The eyes are still open, staring at the ceiling.
I know the score. Without active blood flow from the heart, the nerve cells in the brain begin to die. Two minutes, and his cerebral cortex, his conscious center, will have used up whatever oxygen was left in the stagnant blood. The midbrain might last half an hour, and at the process level of the midbrain, there might be some emotional response. The nerves in the spinal cord might last perhaps an hour. But these are of no use to me. My two minutes were up long ago.
“Keep his heart going,” I say to the colonel, even though we both know it won’t make a difference.
