by A. K. DuBoff
She was certain Leon had learned new information that he had only shared with Kira, and they hadn’t told her for whatever reason. Lexi couldn’t blame them for keeping some things to themselves; after all, they were on an official military-sanctioned undercover assignment while she was just an informant. That meant that whatever he’d found out had important implications.
Even though she understood why they might keep something from her, she didn’t like it. The three of them had become genuine friends over the past several months—or so she believed—and that relationship had been a key part of her staying sane within the cultish Alliance. If they no longer considered her an equal collaborator, she might once again be on her own when it came to finding out what happened to her friend Melisa. She wasn’t about to rely on them if they didn’t fully trust her.
That left her in a tough spot. Lexi had become somewhat lax in her own investigation, deferring to Kira’s lead as an undercover Tararian Guard officer. This new indication of being pushed to the outskirts of the search reminded her that she needed to be proactive in her own efforts.
Perched on the stool in front of her workstation, Lexi’s leg shook with nervous energy. She’d tried to control the tick, but she needed an outlet for her anticipation or she feared she might explode.
If Kira and Leon have a lead, this might be over soon. But if they learned something about what may have happened to Melisa, then why didn’t they tell me?
The truth was, the breakthrough probably had nothing to do with her missing friend. If they had learned key information regarding her whereabouts, Lexi would like to think they would have mentioned something, even if the details were classified.
If they’ve had a breakthrough, we might not be undercover for much longer. If I don’t find out about Melisa now, I might lose my chance. The thought was sobering.
Lexi’s sole motivation for joining the Alliance in the first place had been to find Melisa, and it was only once she was embedded in the organization that she’d learned there were much bigger issues than a single missing person. While she supported the TSS’ and Guard’s efforts to root out the organization’s leaders and put an end to their dangerous activities, she couldn’t abandon her original goal.
I won’t give up finding out what happened to her, she vowed. Once the TSS seizes this Alliance office, I’ll lose the only lead I have. Her friend meant too much to her to leave it to chance that the larger investigation into the Alliance’s activities would result in a clear answer about the fate of a single person. That was information she’d only trust getting on her own.
The problem was how. She’d already been trying to get to the bottom of that mystery for a year. Granted, she’d been excessively careful—passive information-gathering rather than conducting a true investigation.
With time running short, she could no longer afford to be tentative. It was now or never.
Lexi stood abruptly, energized with renewed determination to discover the truth.
She’d been scared, and the fear had made her passive.
No more.
Her abilities gave her an edge. She’d hidden them for so long that the thought of using them felt like discussing the skills of another person. But it was her. The real her.
Staying quiet and playing along wouldn’t solve anything. She’d convinced herself that joining the Alliance was a ‘big move’, yet it was just another kind of running away—like she’d always done when faced with opposition. This time, she’d run toward the problem, but she’d done absolutely nothing to solve it. It’d been a year of sitting around, doing little other than help the very people she’d set out to stop. Her single act of sabotage didn’t make up for her complete lack of engagement in all other respects.
No more being afraid. I need to take a risk. She placed her hands on her desktop, leaning against the rough, wooden surface.
One row over, Shena looked up from the monitor on her own desk. “What are you doing, Lexi?”
With a sudden rush of awareness, Lexi realized how odd her behavior must seem—staring off into space, her expression set with battle-ready determination. She made a conscious effort to relax her pose while she thought up a cover story.
“Sorry,” she replied, “I’ve been struggling with the best approach for this new marketing campaign, and I’m trying to get inspired.”
Shena raised an eyebrow. “It looks like you’re more likely to murder the idea before it forms.”
“Just striking down the bad concepts before they can take hold.” Lexi pushed off from her desk, looking around the room. “I think I need a change of scenery to get the creative juices flowing. I’ll be back.”
“Good luck.” Shena returned to her work.
Lexi hadn’t intended to leave her workstation, but this was precisely the kind of nudge she needed to spur herself to action while she was fired up. However, since she had no plan in mind, she would need to wander until a course of action occurred to her; at least her spontaneous cover story fit.
She set her attention to figuring out a strategy while she roamed the halls.
The only people within this Alliance office who might have answers were the senior managers working on the upper floors. Oren was an oddity among the leadership, spending most of his time in his basement office—perhaps because of his oversight related to the supply inventory stored in the underground tunnel network. All other leaders, as far as Lexi knew, resided almost exclusively on the facility’s upper levels; even their meals were taken in a separate cafeteria, which was rumored to serve much better food.
Getting access to those supervisors would be a challenge. Lexi had no reason to go up to those higher floors in the building, and the managers had few reasons to come down.
Unless… An idea slowly formed in Lexi’s mind.
A novel situation might draw management’s attention. Such an occasion might also have the senior managers distracted enough to allow for light-touch mind-reading without anyone taking notice.
But what kind of distraction could I orchestrate?
Kira or Leon might be able to offer ideas, but Lexi was only taking these steps because they had cut her out of their process. They’d probably try to sideline her if she told them her intentions.
No matter what she did, she’d need to be extremely careful. The Alliance detested Gifted people, and it appeared anyone who was revealed to possess those abilities might find themselves in danger. She suspected that her friend Melisa had unknowingly been open about her Gifts, as Lexi knew her to be, and that might be connected to her unusual disappearance.
Lexi had taken opportunistic telepathic readings before, whenever she’d found herself in a situation with little chance of discovery. The problem was that people weren’t generally thinking about the topics of interest. Mid-level managers didn’t sit around musing about evil master plans; they lamented a boring lunch and longed for relaxation time in the evening. While a telepath could access deeper information buried in a person’s mind, that required a more invasive approach that exponentially increased the likelihood of detection.
I need for them to believe there’s been a leak of their plans, Lexi realized. Get them thinking about the information they want to keep hidden.
Conceptually, she liked the idea. Putting it into practice would be much more difficult.
Lexi wandered toward the office’s main lobby, where there was the most foot traffic of anywhere in the office; it also connected to the main stairway that led to the upper floors. If she was going to happen across a good lead to jumpstart her new investigation, it would be here.
She scanned the room, looking for anyone dressed a little nicer whom she didn’t immediately recognize. Unfortunately, no one jumped out right away.
Standing there watching people would get her unwanted attention, so she took a seat on one of the wooden benches along the wall and pulled out her handheld, pretending to be working. Though her gaze was fixed to the screen, she allowed her mind to roam, gleaning telepath
ic impressions from the passersby.
After five minutes, an intriguing thought snippet caught her attention.
“…Transportation orders. Pending final staff list…”
The thoughts stood out from the buzz of other mental conversations of those around her in the office. Though the statement itself could be about anything, the feeling of the words gave it significance. This person was working on the staffing for the new research lab. She sensed it in her core.
She latched onto the person’s mind and traced the thoughts back to their origin, blocking out the mental din from the other people in the vicinity. Her focus settled on a middle-aged man with intense dark-brown eyes and graying hair, dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt that seemed too formal for the work within the Alliance.
In a stroke of good fortune, he was coming down the staircase from the upper level, heading outside. That would make it much easier to follow him than it would have been if she’d needed to invent an excuse to head upstairs.
As the man reached the bottom stairstep, Lexi rose from her bench and turned away, still focusing on her handheld. She traced his movements with her augmented senses, as if she’d tied an invisible thread to him.
Keeping a dozen meters back, she followed him out from the building and onto the busy street. The telepathic thread made him easy to track, despite her not having a clear line of sight.
More thought snippets came to her. “…Check the inventory with Oren… Arrange for transfer.”
Most likely, he was running through a mental checklist of tasks. While it indicated he was the right person to talk to, she’d need a deeper delve in order to learn where the new research planet was located. Even a name would go a long way.
Unfortunately, while he was alone with his own thoughts, it would be quite obvious if she tried to telepathically direct his thinking toward her desired answers. For optimal covert mind-reading, he’d need to be slightly distracted—such as engaged in idle small-talk.
Lexi followed him along the street, waiting for an opportunity. After ten minutes of darting through foot traffic on the sidewalk, the suited man turned onto a side street Lexi knew well; it was a back way to the transit port.
If they need to get people offworld, that makes sense. Despite being an integral piece in the mystery she was trying to solve, the revelation did little to calm her nerves. The circumstances were looking less and less hypothetical. Real people’s lives were on the line.
The man checked over his shoulder as he stepped onto the side street, prompting Lexi to quickly duck aside, out of view. She gave it several seconds, then followed him, darting behind cover whenever possible.
Half a block down the side street, the man stopped and knocked on an unmarked metal door.
Lexi took up position behind a dumpster and pulled out her handheld, to give the appearance of someone checking directions.
The door creaked open. “Hey. You have the manifest?” a woman asked with a brusque tone.
“Yes, we’re ready.”
This was as good an opening as Lexi would ever get. Though her training wasn’t sophisticated, she’d had enough to know her abilities were above-average. She’d need every bit of that innate talent to invade his mind undetected.
She carefully reached out to glean the thoughts on the surface of the suited man’s mind. Despite the promising conversation he was having out loud, she was met with only thoughts of dinner, a sore back, and lamentations about a lost game of Fastara.
No! there has to be something in here…
She dove in deeper, peeling back the layers of his memory. There was a flash of a ship port, and then a metal briefcase.
Getting closer…
A corner of his mind was walled off. The secrets he was trying hard not to discuss out loud. It would seem his present contact didn’t know the whole story.
Lexi had no choice. She needed to push her luck and go in.
She tugged at his mental guards, willing his mind to let her in. She could force it but—
“Argh!” the man exclaimed in pain, bringing the heel of his hand to his temple.
“You okay?” his companion asked, concern wrinkling her brow.
Oh, shite, that wasn’t supposed to happen! Lexi wanted to pull back, but she was so close. She needed to find out what he knew.
A mental image of a new-looking research lab flooded through to her.
Lexi snapped to focus. The man wasn’t projecting any details about where the lab might be located or its purpose, but his view of the room struck her as a recent experience. She absorbed every detail she could: layout, equipment, environmental controls. It all was filtered through the haze of memory, with some details of the sensory input seemingly absent while other aspects jumped out with unusual emphasis.
He was walking through a corridor. An exterior door was up ahead. If she could just walk outside in that memory, it might give a clue about the landscape or moon configuration that could narrow down—
“That’s a nice handheld there,” a man said from Lexi’s side.
Bomax! Her awareness returned to the presence as the interruption broke her concentration. I don’t have time for this shite.
Trying to ignore the speaker, she took a centering breath and began to fight her way back into the manager’s mind. I need to see outside that lab—
“Hey! I’m talking to you.”
Her telepathic link to the memories shattered.
What the fok does he want? She glared at the scruffy man, who appeared to be a few years older than her, and was advancing far too close for comfort.
“I’m busy.” She returned her attention to her handheld, hoping she could salvage her telepathic inquiry. “And it’s really not. This old model is a piece of shite.”
“Looks fine to me. Hand it over.”
You have to be kidding me! She looked him over from the corners of her eyes, sizing him up. “Are you seriously trying to mug me?”
“There’s no ‘trying’ about it.” He slipped a knife from his sleeve. “Hand it over.”
Lexi sighed as she slipped her handheld into her pants’ pocket. The situation was clearly not going to resolve itself by ignoring him. If she could get rid of him quickly and quietly, she might still have a chance to get back into her target’s mind before his business concluded at the port.
“Hey, I said—”
Lexi struck out with her right hand and gripped the man’s wrist, augmenting her action with a subtle use of telekinesis to prevent him from lashing out at her. “Robbing people isn’t nice.” She yanked the knife from him.
“How—”
Before he could complete the question, she kicked his right thigh. “Go. Get out of here before you make this worse for yourself.”
Undeterred, he lunged for her. “Hand it over!”
Lexi nimbly side-stepped him, and he collided with the dumpster, sending a reverberating clang through the alley.
“Hey! What’s going on over there?” a woman shouted in the distance.
Lexi’s attention snapped to the people she had been spying on. The older woman who’d been speaking with the manager was now staring directly at Lexi with a pinched expression of suspicious accusation.
Shite! Now there was no hope of resuming her telepathic reading.
The increased attention must have been too much for the mugger, because he ran off.
What a foking waste. Lexi looked between the knife in her hand and the two people watching her from down the alley. “Sorry, an idiot tried to rob me,” she said with a casual shrug, then chucked her assailant’s knife into the dumpster.
The man she’d been reading narrowed his eyes. “Hey, you look familiar. Do you work at the office?”
“Depends on which office you mean.” She thought her tone sounded innocent, though it was difficult to be certain with her heart pounding so loudly in her ears.
He started walking toward her. “No, I definitely recognize you. What are you doing here? Were you follow
ing me?”
How in the stars can I talk my way out of this? She resisted an urge to run; doing so would admit guilt. Besides, she had nowhere to go other than back to the Alliance office, and he’d surely track her down there.
“I was,” she admitted at last. Truth was the only way to play this… along with a bold lie. “Someone thinks that it’s necessary to check up on you.”
He paled slightly and shifted on his feet. “Everything is on schedule.”
“Is that so?” Lexi evaluated him. “I guess we’ll find out what they think of my report.” Before he could question her further, she set a brisk pace back to the office.
No, no, no, it wasn’t supposed to go this way!
Her cheeks burned, knowing that she needed to tell Kira about what had happened. If the man recognized that he’d been telepathically probed, it would be obvious that Lexi had abilities. She wasn’t safe anymore.
Can I leave? Is that even an option?
It was possible that the man wouldn’t know what had happened and that he’d just think she had been eavesdropping. She had offered a cover story… one so flimsy that even she didn’t believe it. No, it was pretty clear that her cover had been blown by one foolish act, after a year of trying to worm her way in.
So stupid! Couldn’t you have stayed patient for just a little longer?
There was nothing to do now but fess up. Admit her idiocy.
Lexi found Kira in the dorm, lounging on her bunk.
“Kira, we need to talk. Now,” Lexi whispered.
“Is everything…?” The other woman got up without finishing the question. “Let’s take a walk.”
They took the back exit and huddled in a dead-end turnout that had become their go-to ‘quick chat’ place.
“Shite!” Lexi looked over her shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched. I’m on their list now. They’re going to come for me…
“Hey, calm down.” Kira placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “What happened?”
“I was trying to listen in on a conversation that seemed like it might be related to the new activity planned on that mystery planet. They noticed me snooping.”
