Dreamfall (27 page)

I stopped in front of him. Miya and Naoh looked back at me,
breaking off their conversation by some silent consent.

o’Your brother?” I asked Miya.

“No,” Miya said, and the way she said it told me the only
other thing he could be: Naoh’s lover. Ex-lover. She looked back at him again
as he shifted in her grasp.

The look on his face said he didn’t want to be there,
trapped between the two of them, but he didn’t disappeaL I wondered whether
they were blocking his psi, not letting him escape. He looked at me. I watched
him struggle to focus on my face. “Wha” Miya?” he mumbled. “You
fu ‘ing
Humans
now?” And then I knew what drug he was on, why he hadn’t disappeared, why all
the other addicts were still here around us.

The golden skin of Miya’s face turned cinnamon. She shoved
him away.

Naoh let him go too. He slid down the wall until he was
sitting on the floor, looking sullen. “Lemme ‘lone,
bitches,
”
he
said. The human word stood out like an upraised finger in the flow of Hydran
speech.

“You’re disgusting,” Naoh said. She shoved him with her
foot. “Get up, you Pathetis—”

I caught her arTn, pulling her back. “Stop it.”

Something intangible struck my hand away from her sleeve.
The same pain and disgust were in her eyes as she looked at me, as if contact
with me was too much like contact with him.

I backed up, shaking off my own sense of invisible molestation.

Miya crouched down beside Navu. I watched her try to get him
to respond; watched him turn his face away. I saw the drug patch on his neck:
Nephase.
The same drug the Corpses had used on me. They used it on all the freaks,
to keep them from escapiflg ....

Escape.
That was what he wanted, what they all wanted
in this room. Escape from the Gift: the thing that made them unique; the thing
that made them suffer. “If that’s how you feel,” I said to Naoh, “why did you
bother coming after him?”

“You don’t know how I feel!” she snapped.

I couldn’t deny it. I looked down.

Miya stood up, her shoulders bowed. “Navu ...” she said.
still looking down at him, holding out her hand.

He didn’t look up. Neither did anyone else. We could have
been Corporate Security come to arrest him—we could drag him cursing and
kicking out of here—and I knew nobody would lift a finger to help him.

Suddenly I felt like I was suffocating. I turned and started
for the door, tripping over legs, stepping on hands.

Miya followed me; so did Naoh. Or maybe they’d just had
enough.

I stood outside in the relatively open air of the alley,
taking deep breaths.

“So,
mebtaku,
you had to turn your face away?” Naoh
gestured at the alley around us, at the hidden room in the derelict building we’d
just come out of. I thought I saw tracks of wetness on her face, but in the
faint light I wasn’t sure. “We don’t have the choice of turning oway—” Her
voice fell apart, with rage or grief, I couldn’t tell.

“That wasn’t why,” I said, my own voice hoarse.

“Why, then?” Miya asked. The words were as cool as the fragile
moonlight reaching down to touch us where we stood. I wondered where she found
the strength to maintain that kind of control, when everyone around her seemed
to be losing it. Maybe having spent so much time around Hydran-hating humans
had taught her more than she rcaLtzed.

“1—” My voice broke. “I guess it doesn’t matter where you
come from. Junkies are all the same.”

Naoh spun around. Her telekinetic field slammed me back
against the wall.

“Naoh!” Miya stopped herself with an effort from coming to
my side.

I pushed away from the wall, shaking my head. “I was speaking
from personal exPerience.”

Miya touched her head, gave a shrug of incomprehension. “You
knew an addict?”

“I was an addict.”

I saw them look at each other in the silver half-light.

“When?” Naoh demanded.

“For a long time.”

“Why?”

That wasn’t the question I would have asked, but it deserved
an answer. “Same reasons aS them in there, I suppose.”

She was silent for a moment. “You stopped. How?”

I realized where her rnind still was; what she was really
asking me. But I didn’t have an answer for that. I shook my head again, looking
away. “Where do they get the drugs?” I asked. The shadow-forms of more addicts
were taking shape in the darkness around us as my eyes adjusted to the night.

Naoh gave Miya a look I couldn’t read. Miya glanced down and
didn’t say anything. I wondered again what they wouldn’t tell me. And I
wondered why.

“Tell us who you arc,” Miya murmured, changing the subject
in a way that was way too obvious. “Tell us what happened to you—to your Gift.
I don’t even know your name.”

It occurred to me that Grandmother could have told her how
to find me. I wondered what else she already knew. I hated feeling like
everyone on this side of the fucking planet was talking behind my back right in
front of me. “My name is Cat,” I said.

“Your parents—?” she urged, and I heard something in her
voice that I couldn’t feel in her thoughts. It told me that what I said next
was important,, more important than any self-consciousness I had about sharing
my past with strangers.

I leaned against the cold surface of the wall. “My mother
was Hydran. My father ... \/asn’t.” I looked .rp at the sliver of sky, down
again at the alleyway that already felt too much like home. “I was born on
Ardattee, in a place called Oldcity. My mother died when I was small—someone
killed her. I felt her die ....” I rubbed my hand across my mouth.

“was that ... why you helped me then?” Miya whispered.

I nodded, closing my eyes. “Because, when she needed help ...
nobody was there.” I felt Miya touch me, and suddenly it took all my control to
hold myself together. “I lost my Gift. I lived like—a human, for a long time ....”
I rubbed my hand across my mouth.

Then one day the FTA had picked me off the streets. And suddenly
I’d gone from one more piece of expendable trash in Old-city’s human refuse
dump straight into a dreamworld. They’d promised me a databand, a future, &
life I’d never even dared to hope for—if I cooperated.

The FTA had cleaned me up and glued my brains back together
just enough to let me function as a psion. I was a telepath and nothing else,
but I’d been a
good
one .... I finally had something to be proud of,
something that was really mine. Something I thought no one would ever be able
to take away from me.

Finally I’d had something to lose.

The Feds hadn’t taken in a bunch of freaks and rehabilitated
us out of the goodness of their hearts. A conspiracy of shipping combines had
hired a psion terrorist the Feds knew only as “Quicksilver” to compromise the
Federation’s telhassium supply. Telhassium crystals were what the Federation
ran on: nothing humans could create could match the data storage capacity of
telhassium’s superdense molecular structure. Telhassium was the thing that made
interstellar travel possible—the thing that gave the FTA its economic leverage
against the independent cartels.

Quicksilver had lived up to his name; the FTA hadn’t been
able to get its hands on him. So they’d decided to fight fire with fire by
sending a suicide squad of freaks undercover. I’d been part of it.

“We stopped him. But to do it I had to kill him.” I listened
to myself tell the story, every word as empty now as the place inside my head
where Quicksilver’s mind had immolated and taken my psi with it. “No one could
put me back together again after that. That’s why I’m ... closed.” I touched my
head== I thought of Kissindre Perrymeade, suddenly. The other side of the river
seemed to be light-years awa1l, and receding.

Miya took a deep breath, oS if she’d forgotten to inhale.
She let it out again in a cloud of frost. Her fingers picked restlessly at the
hood of her jacket; I caught her staring at me again. I held her gaze for too
long before I finally looked away.

I took out a camph, bit down on it; an excuse to stall. Then
I glanced at Naoh. Her face had changed too, but not in the same ways. I
wondered whether there was any emotion left in her that wasn’t rooted in anger
and flowering with bitterness. At least this time her anger wasn’t aimed at me.
“They did this to you—‘t” She touched her head. “The Humans?”

I hesitated before I nodded, not sure I really wanted to
think of it that way, even though I knew that a patt of me always did.

“How could you go on living among them?”

I looked up at the thumbnail of sky. “I didn’t have anyplace
else to go.” Knowing that it wasn’t the whole truth; knowing that I didn’t
blame the entire human race for what had happened to me. I’d made a choice when
I killed Quicksilver, and he was the only one who’d had a gun to my head when I
did it. I’d killed him to save my own life ... and to save the life of Jule
taMing, who’d mattered more to me right then than even my own life.

Believing that I’d had choices, and made the right one, was
the only hope I had of ever trusting myself enough to use my Gift again. But
somehow all of that seemed as remote now as the shining grid of Tau Riverton. I
looked back at Naoh. “There’s no place for me with my mother’s people, even if
I knew who they were. But I guess I still needed to prove that to myself. I
guess I’ve proved it now.”

“You’re wrong. You do belong with ss—” Miya said with sudden
feeling. She glanced at Naoh. Naoh’s mouth thinned, but she didn’t deny it. “The
Council doesn’t speak for our people. It never has.” Miya turned back to me. “You’ve
suffered as much because of the Humans as any Hydran—as much as Joby has.”

“I’m not a victim.” I felt my face burn, remembering the
things Kissindre had said to me earlier tonight. “I spent every day of my life
since my mother died fighting to go on living. And every day, I won—” My voice
was shaking. I closed my mouth, and didn’t finish it.

Miya stared at me with her head bent, the way they all did
when they didn’t understand.

“I’m not helpless.”

“You’re alone,” she said with infinite sorrow. I wondered
whether that was an answer or simply another change of subject. “You don’t have
to be.” She reached out, stopped short of actually touching me again.

I looked away from her to glance first at Naoh, then at the
leery shadow-forms watching us from the darkness. “I don’t hate hUmang—”

“Neither do I,” Miya murmured. But she wasn’t speaking for
Naoh .. We n:.d to get out of this place.” She said it aloud, giving me warning
this time, one second before their minds sucked me into a vortex of utter
blackness.

We were back where we’d started, standing in the bleak flat
where they were keeping Joby. Soral and Tiene were there with two of the other
HARM members. This time they seemed to be expecting us. They glanced up at our
arrival and then went back to some silent debate, gesturing and stabbing the
air with their fingers. Wherever they pointed, static crackled. I watched one
of them rise into the air, her legs crossed like she was still sitting on the
floor—setting herself literally above the others and whatever they were arguing
about.

The
taku
they’d been harassing earlier was peacefully
asleep in a niche in the wall, with its head tucked under its wing. Miya
glanced at the debaters’ mental lightning, and I saw her frown. “Stop it!”
Heads turned to look at her, their expressions ranging from resentful to
guilty. The one levitating in the air slowfy sank to the floor. Another one
simply disappeared.

“What was wrong with what they were doing?” I asked.

“
Lagra.
‘showing off,”‘“ she munnured irritably,
slipping into Standard, like she didn’t want to be overheard. “Wasting their

Gift. Using it in stuPid, dangerous ways, as if it were just
a meaningless trick. Like—like—” She broke off, as if she couldn’t think of a
human analogY.

“I understand,” I said softly. I glanced toward the room
where Joby lay sleeping ... what did you mean before, about Joby?” I asked ... What
did humans do to him?” It had looked to me like Tau was doing everything it
could to help his parents deal with his disabiliti”r, even letting Miya get far
enough into the keiretsu to betray them. And yet I remembered the stricken
looks on the faces of his parents when they’d thought they were caught between
a mind reader and the bureaucracy that controlled their lives.

“.He has neurological damage because of a lab accident involving
material from the reefs while his mother was pregnant.” Miya sat down wearily on
a bench. “someone overlooked a toxic viral during the preliminary processing.
Ling called it ‘a disease with tungsten claws.’ It ate iis way through the
seals of two isolation levels, killing everyone in them, before Tau could stop
it. Tau’s countermeasure killed a hundred of their own people along with the
toxin ....”

I grimaced, watching Miya weave her fingers together to stop
their restless motion. I thought about how still most Hydrans were; wondered
whether restlessness was a habit she’d picked up from humans. If it wasn’t, I
wondered what that said about her state of mind.

she glanced up at me, suddenly self-conscious. “Ling was
working on the fringe of the affected area and wearing a safe-suit,” she said,
her voice still deceptively even. “She got very sick, but she didn’t die. she
told me she doesn’t know whether the disease or the ‘cure’ caused Joby’s birth
defects.”

“Was it negligence on Tau’s part?” I asked. “Is that why the
Feds are here?”

“It was negligence.” She shrugged. ‘And there’ve been other
incidents. Tau’s researchers are overworked and its installations are all
understaffed. Burnell says he sees safety code violations and poorly maintained
equipment all the time. Reef-mining is .r,p”nsive. Tau cuts too many corners to
make its profit.”