by Lan Chan
As an EK, I learned to mimic the pattern of other people’s telepathy so that they wouldn’t be able to detect mine. His probe skimmed my mind for a second and then passed over me.
The siren rang. My heart-beat increased. I wouldn’t be able to hold on to my advantage for long. Sooner or later, they would figure out by process of elimination that I had to have something more on my side than just a big mouth.
My next opponent was one of the professional women. She charged at me as soon as the bell rang. Her speed was good, as was her accuracy. It would have been a devastating blow if her punch had landed. But I sidestepped at the last minute and delivered a kick to her head that stopped her cold. Nobody said a word when I returned to the dressing room. The Eagle guy walked past me once more on the way out. His blue eyes pierced me like splinters of ice.
The TK from the Slums went out with the professional woman who snatched the picture of my mum. The latter was the one who returned. Little by little, the candidates from the Slums were whittled away. What was the point of this if they never stood a chance in the first place?
I heard Naveen telling me with such determination in his voice that he only had to make it to the third level in order to supply his wife with medication. Never mind about how they were going to eat in a week’s time. I realised then that this thing was about hope. They had zero chance, but even that small hope was enough to get them through another day.
Colour me annoyed. I’d told Naveen that he could bet on me until the next round.
After that, I figured I might take a dive. They’d get their money, and I could go home. This was turning out to be a massive dead end. It still left the question of why the card was in Aunt Jenny’s safe deposit box.
The longer I sat waiting for the round to be over, the more the pieces started to become disjointed. My aunt was a public prosecutor for the Department of Justice. Was the card part of an investigation she was heading? If so, then why didn’t she leave it in their evidence storage?
My mind had wandered so that I jerked up in surprise when the sound for the second interval went off. Eight contestants left. No surprises that Eagle guy and Photo Snatcher remained. They all outweighed me by twenty kilos. This was a gross miscalculation on my part.
If she were here, I would already be in Mum’s bad books. But her number one complaint about me was that I could never just let anything lie. She blamed it on all the comic books Dad let me read as a child. One time she knocked me out cold and dragged me home from a mission because I refused to leave someone bleeding out in the desert.
“Your desperation for a friend is going to be the death of you,” she’d said after I’d regained consciousness.
“It’s not desperation,” my twelve-year-old self had protested. “It’s called common decency. He had two gunshot wounds, and we just left him.”
“We didn’t know him. He means nothing.”
She walked out of the room then. Conversation over. Friends were a liability. I was better off without them. Hence my less-than-stellar fifteenth birthday party.
“So, what are you?” Card Snatcher said, cutting into my self-reflection. She sat in the seat on the opposite wall.
Feigning innocence, I turned my head both ways. “Me?”
“Yeah.” The smirk on her face said she knew I was faking.
“I’m just a kid looking for my mum.”
Her snort was interrupted by Jacko’s sudden reappearance. He had four guards with him. Everyone else in the room stood to attention. Last minute, I did the same. See, Mum? I can learn to toe the line.
“You,” Jacko pointed at me. “Come with me.”
Without another word, the guards flanked me. When they were on either side, one of them cuffed me with anti-psi bracelets. I balked. It took every inch of my self-control not to fry the cuffs, but that would be a dead giveaway.
“A precaution,” Jacko said. “Nobody gets in to see him without being cuffed.” See the Shadowman? Hell no!
“I don’t want to see him!” I snatched at the metal cuffs on my wrists.
“How come she gets to go?” Photo Snatcher asked.
Ignoring her, Jacko shoved my hands away from where I was trying to squeeze my right wrist out of the cuff. “Either come quietly, or we’ll eject your friends from the stadium sans payment. After all, there are no rules that say we can’t do that.”
My hands fell to my sides. The cold metal of the cuffs turned almost scorching. I tried to regulate the natural rhythm of my brainwaves. The anti-psi technology was discovered by Argyle Hoffman of Hoffman Industries ten years after the events of the Reset. Ironically, it was the radiation from the bombs that activated the dampening effect the bracelets created in our minds.
The stadium might be rudimentary, but these cuffs were state of the art– Generation 7 from the number stamped alongside the Hoffman crest. If I concentrated, I could probably break the cuff itself.
It really negated the effectiveness of anti-psi tech when the tech part was already susceptible to my mind but it would take a lot of energy to pull it off, and I still had a fight to finish. I’d need to conserve it to face-off with one of those professionals.
Instead of leading me back out into the ring, we turned left at a door painted the same black as the tunnel. It didn’t have any markings on it. The door opened up into a corridor so dark, you couldn’t see through to the other side.
“Not gonna happen,” I said. Apprehension flooded my chest. A granite arm shoved me in the back. My feet planted firmly on the floor. “I’m not going in there.”
Already the nightmare was beginning to manifest. Cold tendrils of metal whispered against the side of my face. The clang of surgical instruments inside a tray rattled in my brain. Blood, cold and clotting, filled my senses.
Jacko paid no heed. He stepped into the corridor. Automatic lights that must be activated by sensors began to flicker on. The guard in front of me sneered.
“I have a three-year-old who’s just like you,” the guard said. So much for trying to act like a tough guy. So I was afraid of the dark. Sue me.
The corridor wasn’t as long as I had expected it to be. Once we reached the end, it diverged into opposite staircases. My chest relaxed a little when I realised we weren’t going to go down further; instead, we went up. Three flights of stairs later, the corridor opened out into a boardroom overlooking the river. Outside, the lower city lit up the night sky.
We were on the top floor of the arena. Blinking red lights in each corner of the room told me it was reinforced with anti-psi monitors. Kind of overkill if you asked me. But also telling. Maybe they met all their guests here. Or maybe they chose this room specifically for me. I was at a gigantic tactical disadvantage.
This room afforded the occupant a panoramic view of the entire sector belonging to the Shadowman. Everywhere you turned, there was floor to ceiling windows. My neck strained to take in everything at once. Massive as the room was, the only piece of furniture in it was a rectangular glass desk way on the other side of the room. There was one executive chair behind it, facing towards the glass. The guards around me stopped well before we even got anywhere close to it.
“She’s here, boss,” Jacko said.
The lights surrounding the desk began to dim. One by one, they winked out until we were left in semi-darkness. As much as I despised Edward Blake, the Street King of City Square, I could at least say that he wasn’t this paranoid. The death of a King was a bad thing for all involved. It wasn’t right that they held so much power, but if one died, the resulting vacuum often ended up in more bloodshed. The Shadowman took precautions to a whole new level. Though I imagined if I had that kind of reputation, I’d be a bit nuts too.
Four figures melted out of the shadows from a door on the far left of us. I couldn’t tell from their physiques whether they were male or female. They were dressed head to toe in black and were almost exactly the same height and build. Each walked with the kind of fluid grace of a dancer. That’s how I knew they
were professional fighters.
Their fluid grace made the shadow boxing contestants look like monkeys. Myself included. When they were in position flanking the desk, the chair swivelled slowly around.
Though I could make out the movement, I couldn’t pick out the shadow sitting on it. Which I guess was the point even if it was a pain in my butt.
“So you’re the girl who interfered with my game.” The voice was filtered through a voice modulator. Paranoia city. The Shadowman flicked his hand. The guards in front of me parted. He waved me forward. I stepped up until I was level with Jacko.
“What’s your name?” Shadowman asked.
“Raven,” I said.
“Your real name.”
“What’s yours?”
Beside me, Jacko tensed. I turned my head to the right wondering whether any of them was carrying a concealed weapon. The guards around me were armed but the silhouettes of the Shadowman’s bodyguards were too smooth for weapons.
“Fair’s fair,” I said. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
The laughter was humourless at best. Threatening at worst. “You walk into my house and think you can dictate how I do business?”
Uh oh. This was not good. Mum wasn’t big on passiveness. There was no way in hell she would have accepted me being a damsel in distress. So I learned to speak up. Fifteen years of not keeping my mouth shut was coming back to bite me big time.
Telepathy swirled around my mind. It tried desperately to connect with something outside the room. I tried to channel Mum. What would she do in a situation like this?
The obvious answer was that she would never get herself into this mess in the first place. I dredged up memories I’d tried to suppress after she left. She would want me to run. No doubt about it. But where would I go? My flight from here would be short, and they would give chase. I had no illusions about who would come out on top. In the absence of a possible flight response, I could only fight.
“If you happen to be in a situation where you have to fight,” Mum used to say, “make sure you go down swinging. We fight not because we want to but because we have to. And if we have to, we make it worthwhile.”
Counting to ten, I swallowed the terror that was threatening to turn my voice into jelly. “You already know who I am,” I said. Sweeping the room and jiggling my wrists, I made a point of showing them the anti-psi technology. “Cut to the chase.”
The Shadowman leaned forward. Thanks to the anti-psi tech, if he was an esper, then any order to kill me would have to be issued verbally. Or with some kind of hand signal. My eyes darted all over the figure in the dark, watching for such a movement.
“Very well. You’re aware of what the stakes are if you win,” the Shadowman said. “The prize is either a financial reward or a chance to become one of my foot soldiers. Is that what you want to be?”
I shook my head. “I’ll take the money.”
It was hard to tell through the voice modifier whether he was clearing his throat or if he’d grunted in disgust. “You realise the opportunity you’re throwing away?”
“You’re assuming I’m going to win.”
He tilted his head up. A screen came down from the ceiling behind him. It flicked to life and showed me during my last fight.
“Not many teenagers can step into my arena and survive the way you have. Coupled with your EK, I would say it’s going to be an interesting final round.”
I shrugged. It was like pulling lead over my shoulders. What I wanted to do was just shrink back into myself. “I don’t care about any of that,” I said. “I’ll take the money for my friends.”
“What about your mother?”
My head snapped up. “What about her?”
“Jacko tells me you’ve been showing her picture to anyone who’ll look, wanting to know if they’ve seen her.”
“You know where she is,” I said.
He moved to rest his elbow on the desk. I imagined he was steepling his fingers like every super-villain in my comic books. “You’ll never know unless you win the final round.”
“Why does that matter?” I asked. “I’m not here to make trouble. I just want to know where she is.”
Unaware that I’d taken a step forward, I blinked when the two bodyguards in front of the Shadowman moved their legs into a fighting stance.
“Come work for me, and I’ll tell you everything I know about her.”
“Why do you even want me? Like you said, I’m just a kid.”
“You are now. But you won’t be forever.”
I could just hear Mum losing her shit at me if I took the deal. It went against everything she and Dad ever believed in. I wasn’t a pawn for his or any King’s amusement. No matter how much I wanted to know where she was, I wasn’t willing to sell my soul for it.
“No,” I said.
“Take some time to think about it.”
“No. You won’t tell me, and you won’t pay me. So you leave me no choice but to walk away.”
“What about your friends?”
Swallowing past the jagged stone in my throat, I shrugged. “I have no friends.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew it was the truth. It had to be. Until this very moment, the magnitude of it had escaped me. As much as I tried to deny it, as much as it hurt in such a visceral way that my mask was at risk of cracking, it was the honest truth. I was an alpha EK esper. Statistically speaking, I was in the one percent minority of the human species. When push came to shove, every decision I made to use my abilities or not, lived and died with me. So I was alone. And I would always be alone.
“And yet you chose to help those two illegals.”
“Well, you weren’t doing a very good job of it.”
A hand grabbed my shoulder in a vise grip. My mind switched as soon as the guard made contact. It was a reflex. I was hardwired to believe an attack was coming. Before I knew what was happening, I jabbed at the guard’s stomach with my elbow and used his weight to flip him onto his back. My foot came down to rested on his windpipe.
And there it was: the click of three guns. Before I could even try to push at the first wall of anti-psi tech with my mind, a laugh rang out across the room. It was so haunted behind the transmitter that all the adrenaline seeped from my bones. It was the laugh of a ghost– someone utterly without emotion.
I wanted to turn tail and run.
11
At least the guards were as unsure as I was. “Release him,” the Shadowman said. Knowing when to pick my battles, I lifted my foot and stepped back in line. The guard choked out a couple of breaths before getting up and taking his previous position.
“Leave,” the Shadowman said. For a blissful moment, I thought he was talking to me, until the guard started to back away from the room.
“You amuse me,” the Shadowman said. “You’re like a little mouse gnawing away at an electrical cord, too intent on your mission and too stupid to realise you’re setting yourself up to die. I’ll wager with you then that you won’t be able to win the game.”
“I just said I wasn’t going to continue.”
“Win it, and I’ll show her to you.”
“But...” My protests fell on deaf ears. He had already melted away into the darkness. The lights came on and there was no evidence that he’d even been there. Not even the swivel chair moved an inch.
The guards turned around, took off my cuffs, and marched me back to the dressing room. When I got there, the next round was already underway. Almost as soon as my foot touched the inside of the dressing room threshold, my beeper went off. The hulking man that walked out with me was the biggest guy there. His head was shaved completely bare besides a thin strip running down the middle. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. I suspected that might be because they didn’t make clothes in his size.
When we stepped out into the lights of the arena, I could hear people in the crowd laughing. There were bets changing hands from those who were here merely for fun. A lot of the seats for famili
es of the Slums contestants were empty.
My eyes tracked to where Daisy and Naveen sat. He had some colour back in his face.
My opponent’s arena name was Goliath. Next to some of the other professional fighters, he hadn’t seemed so big. Now that we were in the ring together, I had to crane my neck up just to look into his eyes. Every part of him was raw muscle wrapped in a package of steel. He had every physical advantage except for one. I was an esper.
A quick telepathic scan made my breath hitch. He was a Void. I was screwed with a capital S.
When the referee sounded the siren, the crowd held its collective breath. Unlike my first opponent, who had size but very little experience, this guy seemed to know what he was doing. He came forward at a steady pace, not wanting to tire himself out. Size also equated to speed. That was what he was expecting me to use. I obliged him to begin with, using it as a way to give myself time to measure his strengths and weaknesses. At all times, I kept my eyes on every twitch of his muscles. One misjudged feint and I would be done for.
We started off trading jabs. His reach was almost twice the length of mine. I needed to get in a lot closer to be able to trade blows. Only problem was that my hits were like little kitten tickles to him. Maybe I could run around the ring a little bit to tire him out.
“What’s the matter, mousey?” Goliath said. “We can get this all over with as painlessly as you want.”
“Perfect,” I said. We circled each other again. “You can forfeit any time you like.”
He started laughing. In the midst of it, he took a dive and lunged for me. Sensing his intent, I slid out from underneath his swing and rolled to the other side of the ring. I righted myself and spun around just in time to duck again. This time I caught the abrasive caress of his fingertips against my arm. Close.
We stared at each other. I smiled. Faking him out probably wasn’t going to do much. But I didn’t have much more in my arsenal.
“Come on, mousey. Why do you have to put yourself through this? We both know you’re not getting out of this one conscious. Come closer, and I’ll go easy on you.”
