by T. C. Edge
My breathing stays calm. Yet behind my chest, my heart thuds, pressing against my ribs. I feel alive, alert, my mind focusing hard.
Awakening.
Then, behind me, to an alley on the left, I see the quick shuffle of movement. A figure darts towards me, scuttling from the darkness. I let him come, let him near me, moving behind my back and growling into my ear. I feel a sharp point tickling the space between my shoulder blades, a knife intended to force my acquiescence.
“Don’t move. I don’t want to hurt you. Just gimme the jacket, and I’ll be on my way.”
The voice is coarse, sending a waft of stinking breath past my hood and flowing up my nose. My heart pulses with a little more force as I prepare to make my move.
“No,” I say coolly. “The jacket’s mine.”
I want to give him a chance. I want to make sure he deserves what I do next.
Once more, his putrid breath fills the air in front of me.
“You gimme the jacket now,” he says, his words oozing more menace, his knife digging a little deeper. “If you don’t, I’ll take a lot more than that…”
I feel his hand gripping my side, slipping down.
He’s done. He deserves it all.
I uncoil my limbs, spinning with rage. My eyes are quick enough to pick up the look of utter surprise on his face, my movements so quick he’s unable to react in any physical fashion as I whip my fist across his jaw.
His eyes roll about for a few moments in his skull, before falling away and leaving nothing but white. As his body collapses, I scoot in and grab him, his grotty clothes stained and dirty.
In a split second, I dash with his weight in my arms, shooting into the alley that just coughed him up. It’s his territory, and his alone. No one else will join us.
Good…
I plant him against a wall, hidden down in the doorway of a derelict building and out of the rain. I have my prize, I’ve tested my powers.
And now, I test the rest.
He takes a little while to wake up. I help him on his way by lightly slapping his cheeks, making sure to bind his hands and feet with tape before I do so.
When his eyes do open, they hold the same look they had before I closed them, as if his brain has just come back to life and continued on from where it left off.
“Ahhhhh,” he mutters, looking at me with confusion.
I’m hidden beneath my cloak, my face in shadow. He can’t see it.
“Who…who are you?” he asks, his hard words melting away. He’s nothing but a frightened child now. And at my mercy. “What do you want with me?” he stammers.
I don’t answer for a moment. His staring eyes are exactly what I’m here for.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper, making sure to lower the pitch of my voice to conceal it. “You’re just here to help me.”
“Help you…how?”
“Just look at me and relax,” I say, repeating Agent Woolf’s words. “That’s all I want you to do.”
“I…I don’t understand. You can keep the jacket. I’m sorry…I shouldn’t have…”
“Shhhhh,” I say. “Stay calm, stay silent. Just look at me, and nothing else.”
My words help to soothe him. But they’re creepy and cryptic enough to make sure his eyes stay open. Wide open.
It’s exactly what I need. I mean this man no harm, despite what he did, or tried to do. To me, he’s nothing but practice. And I need lots of practice.
So I look into his eyes, a dark shade of blue, cracked around the rims with streaks of red. I put into practice the basic training Zander gave me, utilising the situation and my pacing heart to search deeper, to find the part of this man that contains his memory.
I move in, and sift through, and then blurred images begin to form. I did this with Zander, but his memories never grew in clarity. They stayed blurred and muddy, my powers yet to manifest.
But today it’s different. The images grow clearer, almost identifiable. I see them all, floating about in little clouds inside him, memories of his recent past hovering on the surface.
I focus harder, and dive deeper, moving into other parts of him, seeing more distant memories. Memories from his past, days or weeks or months ago. The further in I go, the more blurred they become, his own recollections less sturdily formed and harder for me to inspect.
My heart rages wildly as I move within his mind, a smile of wonder working up on my face. I pull back from the distant memories and look again upon his recent ones, far clearer now, the world appearing from his perspective.
Right there, I see myself, and watch him coming out of the shadows and approach me from behind. I see the knife to my back, and begin to feel his own pacing heart as he growls into my ear. I feel his desire for my jacket, and the emptiness inside him, his life out here a constant fight for survival.
Then, I see me spin with such pace he’s unable to react, my fist flashing across his face like lightning, hitting with such force due to its speed. Immediately, a black swamp descends, and the memory concludes, fading into nothing.
For a little while longer, I stroll through his mind, through this strange world of floating recollections, stretching away into the distance as far as the eye can see. I look at other memories, getting a sense for the man. Fighting with others for scraps of food. Battling over a corpse for a new pair of shoes. Hiding in the shadows as a troop of Con-Cops come marching through, lighting up the world with their torches and spotlights as they search for Disposables to round up to be taken to the REEF.
I lose track of time in this man’s head, searching through his memories without realising what damage I’m doing. And when I finally pull back, and appear in that dark alleyway again, and see the man ahead of me, tied up in the doorway, I see eyes of total grief looking back.
He looks lost. His eyes stare forward, broken, his breathing smooth and calm. I shake him on the shoulder, and try to draw him back out.
His eyes stay as they are, sticking forward in one direction, not engaging with me as I attempt to catch his attention.
“Hello, can you hear me?” I ask, shaking him harder. “Hello?!”
Nothing happens. He just sits there, his brain scrambled by my reckless infiltration.
I don’t know what to do.
And then I hear it. A voice from the end of the alley. And coming with it, a cloaked figure, walking casually towards me.
“What are you doing here, Brie?”
I look to see my brother moving towards me. His voice is calm, his footfall silent. The rain continues to tap, dancing on his shoulders and head, covered in its hood.
“I…help me,” I say. “I’ve done something to this man…”
He reaches me, stepping undercover from the rain, and bends his knees.
“What did you do?” he asks.
“I just…I was testing my powers. I looked into his memories, that’s all. I just did what you’ve done to me, what you taught me…”
“Did you watch any?”
“Um, yeah, quite a few. I couldn’t help it.”
“You must have rearranged something in there. The mind is a delicate thing, and you have to treat things carefully when you look inside them. If you disorganise even a single memory, it can be costly.”
“I was just looking, though.”
“You must have gone deep, must have made too much noise. If you jump between memories, sometimes they get moved out of sync. Step aside,” he says.
He takes my place before the man, and stares deeply into him. For a few long moments, the two lock together in a silent staring contest. Then, suddenly, Zander withdraws, and the man’s eyes slowly come back to life.
“Wha…what’s happening?!” he stammers. His eyes turn to see the two of us before him. “What did you do to me?!”
“Nothing permanent,” says Zander, his voice carrying no caring or sympathy.
He reaches forward and unties the man’s hands and feet, before stepping back into the dripping rain beside me.<
br />
“Now, be on your way. You may have a headache for a day or two, but that will fade. Go, leave us.”
The man doesn’t need to be told twice. Looking at Zander like he’s the Devil incarnate, he works his way up onto trembling legs and stumbles away down the alley, tumbling occasionally into the acid puddles as he goes.
I watch him go, feeling entirely foolish. Had Zander not come along, I’d have probably done irreparable damage to him.
But how did Zander come along?
“How did you find me?” I ask, turning back to him.
“We’re connected, Brie,” he says nonchalantly, as if that’s all the explanation I need. “Maybe you can’t feel it yet, but I can always feel you. I sensed you were near, and came looking for you. It’s a good thing I found you when I did.”
I duck my head guiltily.
His words brighten.
“It happens to the best of us,” he says, lifting my chin. “No permanent harm done. And, in any case, that man’s done enough bad in his life to deserve what you did to him.”
“How do you know that?” I ask. “How can you see his memories without messing with his head?”
“Practice,” he says. “This is your first time. You went plodding through without thinking. It happens. Soon enough, you’ll learn how to do it properly.”
“How soon? We don’t have much time.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “We don’t. And you’ve got a lot to learn.”
He turns down the alley, and sets his eyes to the murky world before us.
“Now come, let’s try again. And this time, we’ll do it right.”
64
As we move off eastwards, my brother attempts to offer a better explanation as to what I did, and how I need to behave in future. He uses layman’s terms to keep things simple, choosing not to overload me with too much mumbo-jumbo.
“Think of it like being at a buffet,” he explains. “You’re starving, and there’s all this amazing looking food around you. You don’t know what’s going to taste the best, and it’s all new to you, so you just fill your plate with everything you can see. That’s kind of what happened. That was your first successful attempt at infiltrating a man’s mind and exploring his memories. Of course you’re going to be excited by it. And of course you’re going to jump around without much thought for what you’re doing. Are you with me so far?”
“I think so, yeah. But, how do you do it? When you search someone’s memories, how do you do all that without screwing them up?”
“As I say, practice is important. Mostly, you go looking for something specific. You’re searching for a particular memory, or a particular type of memory. You look either short term or long term, and that all helps to narrow things down. You clearly went rushing about without any set design, and that’s how you mess with someone’s head. So much of what we are is based on our memories. If you begin reordering them, or bringing too many to the surface at once, then it can have terrible consequences. Trust me, I’ve done it before.”
“You have?”
“Of course. As you know, my powers started manifesting when I was just 12. When they first came, I had no mentor to teach me, no one to show me what to do. You can imagine how dangerous that was. I learned the hard way that my actions had terrible consequences. It makes me ashamed to think of how many minds I damaged.”
“That sounds terrible. It must have been hard.”
“It was,” he says solemnly. “When my powers developed, and I had better control over them, I tried to find those I’d affected. I wanted to bring them back…”
“And did you?”
“One,” he says. “I found one. She had someone to care for her, to feed her. I was able to bring her mind back. But the others…well, I doubt they’d last long in such a state without help.”
He shakes his head, trailing off, and I recall his story of the first man he killed, the man who murdered Linda. He’d told me then that he’d torn through that man’s mind, paralysing his body with a thought, before stabbing him through the heart with a knife.
I suppose, after all, our minds can be used as weapons too. That destroying a person’s mental capabilities can be both an accident and an intentional act, aimed to maim and paralyse.
Yet, while the man who killed his guardian was the first life he took, there must have been others before him. Others whose lives were lost due to his actions, even though that was never his intention.
I can imagine them now, lost and alone on the streets, unable to function properly. Wasting away without food or water or help from anyone, their bodies scavenged for clothes and what meagre possessions they might have.
Zander must have been unable to turn things back, just a child recklessly moving through the northern quarter, leaving a trail of empty minds and bodies behind in his wake.
He learned the hard way, but I don’t have to. I’m lucky to have him to guide me, the path ahead already set.
So as he teaches me, I soak it all up, and take note of every single word he utters. I ask questions, probing anywhere I can to make sure I understand him correctly. Mostly, he keeps things simple enough for me to understand, at least in part. Yet, in the end, the only way I’m going to learn is by doing it all for myself.
We progress further to the east, able to move around a little more freely here without such a contingent of Con-Cops and City Guards on patrol. In fact, there aren’t really any of them. They only come when hunting down hybrids or members of the Nameless, or rounding up Disposables to be either exterminated or added to their own number.
Otherwise, it’s over in the more populous areas of Outer Haven that a large presence of security forces are kept. Intended, of course, to do little more than gradually tighten the Consortium’s grips on the streets they govern.
Here, the place is so sparsely populated to the naked eye. Yet, if you look a little harder, you see them. People, hiding in their little cracks and crevices, keeping to the darkest shadows they can find. I can’t conceive of a more squalid existence, my thoughts always turning to who these people are, how they found themselves out here, frightened and alone.
I always feared that Drum would join their ranks. And seeing them now, he reappears in my thoughts once more. I turn to Zander, looking for an update on my friend.
“How is he? Drum, I mean?”
“He’s OK. A bit shaken up after the last few days, as you’d expect. But he’s settling in alright.”
“Shaken up? Can’t you just, you know, cloud his memories of it all? Make him feel better?”
“I could, if he wanted me to. I suspect he’d rather retain them, though. He’s safe, Brie, that’s all that matters right now.”
“And…what about his mental state? He’s only just lost two close friends, and he killed a man, Zander. Surely that’s going to mess with a kid of his age.”
“Honestly, I can’t tell you. He’s quiet, keeps himself to himself, and I don’t know him. Maybe that’s how he always is, I don’t know.”
“I’d like to see him,” I say quickly. “Can we go down there?”
He nods.
“Later. But right now, we have work to do.”
I smile and nod and set my mind back to the task.
“Sure…you’re right. So, you want to use more Disposables for me to train with?” I ask. “I mean, I only came here because I couldn’t get through to you – oh, yeah, what were you doing, by the way? You never answered me…”
“I was asleep,” he says.
Ah, my suspicion is confirmed.
“Thought so. Work been keeping you up late then?”
“Something like that. I’ve had a few late nights recently.”
“Well, at least now I know we can’t communicate when one of us is sleeping.”
“Well, that’s not entirely true. You just need to shout loud enough. You’re not going to wake someone up with nothing but a whisper, are you?”
“I guess not,” I admit. “I’ll bear th
at in mind for next time.”
“Yes, do, but only if it’s important. I’d rather not have you shouting me awake for no reason.”
“Trust me, I’m not exactly going to be getting in touch with you telepathically just for a bit of chit-chat. But, yeah, I couldn’t get through to you earlier, so I came here. Although, now that you’ve tracked me down, can’t we just go to the underlands? Use some of the Nameless for me to practice on.”
It makes a lot of sense to me. Why bother using strangers around here when I can practice on people who won’t put up a fight?
Zander, as always, has his reasons.
Shaking his head, he says: “This is less dangerous. The members of the Nameless know you. If one should get caught on a mission, then you could be found out. I won’t take that risk when I don’t need to. Here, no one knows who you are, and you can keep your face hidden under your hood. There’s nowhere better to train than right here. We just need to keep a watch for trouble, that’s all.”
A fair explanation. Makes perfect sense to me.
“So, I was right to come here then,” I say, feeling vindicated for my actions.
“Yeah, although I’d have rather you waited to talk to me first, Brie.”
“Well, I tried, as I say. I couldn’t just wait around forever. Nothing can happen until I develop my powers. It’s pretty frustrating just sitting around the academy, waiting for orders.”
“Perhaps. But I’m here now, so let’s get to it.”
With Zander now offering me his years of experience, we go about finding a suitable subject in a wholly different way to how I behaved earlier. I don’t lure someone in, acting as bait, or even put myself in any state of danger. Instead, we merely trace the local alleys in search of some poor soul to act as our guinea pig.
I question the morals of it as we go, but Zander assures me that, with him there supporting me, nothing bad is going to happen.
I take his word for it as we approach our first subject: a middle-aged woman sitting cross-legged in the recess of a crumbling building, its façade badly damaged and filled with a number of bullet holes and blasts. It’s another reminder that a war has been raging here in the northern quarter for some time.
