Marked (21 page)

“You weren't ready, kid.”

I digested that for a moment. Still, regret burned at my stomach. Deep, full regret, of what might have been.

He regarded me. “You had to learn to believe in the program. In God. In yourself. You're not there yet, but you're on your way now. That is, if you keep up praying.”

I blinked. He thought I was on my way. Even with the qualifier, it was one of the best compliments I'd gotten in a long time. And from Swartz. Today of all days.

Selah arrived, found the little red pepper salad I'd gotten for her, and pecked me on the cheek. She moved it to the dining room table, where she had some papers laid out for a project she was working on. So it was just me and Swartz. We ate, companionably, together.

Swartz finished about half the sandwich, blotted at his mouth with a napkin, and pushed the plate away. He looked tired, but his mind was still razor-sharp. “You're not here in the middle of the day to talk about Cherabino, are you?”

I took another bite of sandwich, which was suddenly ash in my mouth.

“What are you here to talk about?”

I looked at my plate.

Swartz sighed. “I have a cane now, you know.” A reference to how many times I'd told him to whap anyone who got in his way.

“I . . .” I trailed off. Took a breath. “The Guild's been making threats. Credible threats. They wanted me to investigate this thing for them.”

“You told me. It was Kara who asked, right?”

“She's not in the picture anymore.” I forced myself to move on, no matter what it cost me. The words came out slowly, at first: “Now it's the politicians. And I've stepped out of line, to their thinking, and gotten too ambitious, and gone after somebody too high up. I've caught somebody in wrongdoing, but it's the wrong guy for the murder and they're . . . well, they're threatening to mind-wipe me, Swartz.”

Surprise and concern came from him across Mindspace. “What . . . what exactly does that mean?”

“In this case, they say they'll erase the last ten years of my life.”

He sat, grave. After a moment: “Can they?”

“They can. Maybe they won't. Cherabino has ideas. I have ideas. I am going to fight. But reality—”

“The Koshna Accords,” Swartz said.

“Yeah.”

A long pause, in which he thought and I tried not to feel.

“I'd . . . I'd rather they killed me, you know. Leaving me back there after they kicked me out of the Guild, without any of
this.
” I waved my hand around the kitchen, to him. “Without any of
me.
”

“Ten years ago you were sliding toward the street. Addicted.”

“Yeah.”

“The habits are still in your brain.”

“I know.”

Odds were, I'd wake up in the middle of the worst Satin addiction I'd had, and if I wasn't physically addicted at first, those desperate habits and cravings would send me right back into the throes of it. I didn't know if I could get myself out a second time. Not without Cherabino and Swartz, and what were the odds of finding them again?

“They might kill me anyway,” I said.

Swartz leaned on the table and thought. And thought. I could see the thoughts, like a master cardplayer shuffling through cards, dealing and collecting and fanning them out one after the other.

And I waited, an idea—and this hope—the only thing left.

Finally he nodded. Then he looked up at me, and the pain in his eyes hurt me. Physically hurt me. “We can't stop it?” he asked.

“I'll try, but . . . I can't run. I'm marked. I'll show up at the Guild or they will make me.”

“That's it?”

I nodded.

“I'll go with you,” he said, and grabbed the cane, half standing.

“I don't think you can,” I said. With all the Tech and various Mindspace devices at the Guild, even if they'd let him in the door, there could be issues. I didn't know how stable his heart was right now, and the heart was controlled by tiny neurons linked into the rest of the body's neural net. One of the scariest lessons in Deconstruction was learning how to manipulate that net in someone with a weak heart to cause worsening of symptoms and possibly death. Not that I think anyone would do anything deliberately . . . Well, maybe I did. They'd used his condition against me before. I took the plunge and lied: “They wouldn't let you in anyway. It's tomorrow. I'm getting Cherabino to take me.”

Swartz nodded. “Isabella will know what to do.” He settled back in the chair, leaning on the cane. “What do you need?”

“Not to think for a while. Cigarettes aren't doing it, and I'm wanting the drug way, way too much.”

He nodded. “Stay here today. Selah needs some help in the garden, and there's plenty of flies to be made. You can talk if you need, and we can put our heads together.” But the feeling I got from him, for the very first time, was uncertainty. Huge, gaping uncertainty and worry. And sadness, over and through it all.

And that scared me worse than anything so far. If Swartz didn't have an answer . . . Maybe there wasn't one.

•   •   •

I was covered in sweat and dirt in a borrowed oversized sweatshirt of Swartz's, digging holes for fence posts in the semifrozen ground, when Cherabino's police car pulled up, sirens flashing, in the front yard.

Selah stood up, taking off her gardening gloves.

I felt Cherabino before I saw her, strong emotions hitting me like a blow, layer after layer of panic and worry and anger and everything else, layer after layer poured out. Raw strength with no control—my strength, perhaps, and her lack of control, if the Link had anything to do with it. Maybe I was just attuned.

She trotted to Selah, emotions so painfully loud, so painfully out of control. “I'm sorry. I need Boy Wonder.”

“Will he be back?” Selah asked, eyebrows down. “My husband—”

“I'll call Swartz later.” Cherabino moved next to me. “Let's go.”

I set down the shovel. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong, I'm just running in a hurry. You were hard to find, and my informant gets twitchy if I'm too late.” She'd closed two cases the last time he contacted her, and she didn't want to miss the guy.

“Okay . . .” I pulled off Swartz's gardening gloves and dropped them on the ground. “You realize I'm covered in dirt. It will get in your cruiser.”

“You realize I said out of time? We'll clean up the dirt later.” She grabbed my arm and pulled.

Selah watched us go.

The siren sound turned on as we entered the car.

CHAPTER 19

“That was a
stoplight,” I said. “Stop sign! Stop sign!”

Cherabino brought the car to a screeching halt as a handicapped man cursed at us from the sidewalk, hands on his anti-grav scooter, which had barely stopped in time.

She imagined slapping me; then I got a flash of her sensei's face. Too violent, his face said. Nonviolence is the only way. Nonviolence and control. He'd made her run twenty miles the last time she hit me, and he'd been right to do it, even with her bad knees. She breathed out through her teeth. “I'm driving,” she said, in her “Take Charge, I'm a Cop” voice. Inside she was brittle, and irritated, and worried about being late.

Besides, I was right. “Sorry,” she muttered, almost too low to hear. “I can be a little pushy when I'm in a hurry.”

“No kidding,” I said. I hadn't realized she'd talked to her sensei about me. But it made sense. Her sensei was her Swartz, her guy to help her figure out life.

“I'll work on it,” Cherabino said, not sure if she meant it.

The man's scooter made its ponderous way across the intersection at approximately five feet a minute as we waited, Cherabino impatiently. The car behind us honked, echoing that impatience.

And then it happened. My precognition, my stubborn future sense, decided to work.

The universe dissolved out from under me all at once, no warning. I was in an old barn, the smell of moldy hay and ancient horse droppings overwhelming. The world was fuzzy, the clouds of sunlight and dust making watercolor streaks in my vision so I couldn't see clearly.

I turned, trying to get a fix on my position, trying to understand where and when I was. The air was cold, the sunlight thin; midwinter, maybe? Soon? Not a year from now, not two.

There: in the center of the barn in a cleared space, two figures. One in a chair, moving in a strange way that made me think,
Tied up
. I squinted. A boy? A boy about nine perhaps? I knew that boy.

I was suddenly, unreasonably, afraid for that boy.

The other figure looked up, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt despite the fuzziness of my vision that it was Sibley. The strangler for hire I'd put in jail just a few weeks ago. The man I knew worked for Fiske, doing his dirty work.

I held a phone in my hand, the round receiver a weight I didn't like. A voice sounded in my ear—a voice my future self knew was Garrett Fiske.

“Sibley will kill him,” Fiske's voice said slowly, with promise built into the words. “He will kill him and you will watch. You deserve to be put in your place.”

“Kill me instead,” my future self said, voice shaking. “You can't do this! He's just a boy. Kill me instead. I won't fight you.” I tried to move but couldn't. “You can't do this,” I said again.

“No, you don't get to be self-sacrificing today,” Fiske's voice said. He was behind the paralysis, I knew, like he was behind all of this. “You deserve to suffer through the results of your actions.”

Sibley pulled out a rope and the boy started screaming, high-pitched hysterical screaming. I screamed too, feeling his panic, feeling death approaching.

I felt Cherabino in my head then, piggybacking on the vision.
Jacob
, she said.
It's Jacob. Fiske has got Jacob!

Her panic combined with me ripped the vision apart, and we were back in the car. The man in the scooter ponderously moved onto the sidewalk.

Cherabino gripped the steering wheel with white- knuckled hands while the car behind her honked again. The emotions bubbled up again, panic the strongest one, panic and anger and determination and a sense of
wrongness
, emotions so strong and roiling they were like two overly strong colognes stuck in the confines of the car with us.

“That was one of your visions,” Cherabino said.

“Yeah,” I coughed out, just now starting to breathe.

“Fiske getting Sibley to kill Jacob. My sister's kid.”

“I—”

“Over my dead body,” Cherabino spat out, and pulled the flyer away with a screech.

I coughed again. “We don't know—”

“I know what I saw,” she said.

The anti-grav engines
whined
as she took the car airborne in a highly illegal vertical lane change in the middle of a city street. When honks came all around, she turned the lights and sirens on. She had a goal, and a purpose, and no citizens were going to stand in her angry way.

“We don't know it's going to happen,” I protested, but I didn't believe it. The vision had been too inevitable, too real.

Cherabino looked over at me, narrowly missing a floating lane marker. “Tell me your accuracy rate isn't more than seventy-five percent. Tell me this one's a fluke. Tell me, Adam!”

“Look at the road,” I said instead. I was certain. Of all the visions in the world, this one had the weighty quality of certainty.

The vision had happened in winter, in a time not far from now. And Cherabino was about to move on Fiske with her task force.

“Tell me I'm wrong,” she spat.

“I can't,” I said, the bottom dropping out of my world.

•   •   •

She screeched down onto old asphalt and accelerated. We were in the richest section of the Atlanta, near the governor's mansion, on one of the smallest streets in between trees, and she was treating it like a four-lane highway.

Too fast, too fast,
my brain yelled, still trying to process, still trying to catch up with her emotion, with my emotion, with the vision.

“Fiske does not take Jacob,” she said, and threw the car into a sudden turn.

She screeched into the open gate of an Italian-style mansion, white stone lions on either side. She swept around the circular drive and threw the car into park too fast, too fast. My heart pounded like a drum played by a teenager.

She reached over me into the glove compartment, then grabbed the rifle from the rack behind us, pushing in a bright green electrically charged stun clip, her anger making her hands move faster than I could see. She'd more likely survive if she used nonlethal methods, her mind informed me.

“His men will be here any second.” The words flew out of her mouth. “Now's the time to do your disable-their-brain thing.”

She was out of the car before I finished processing that tidbit. Fiske's house? Fiske's? This was happening too fast—

The first two guards arrived, in full combat gear, one with a napkin still tucked into the front of his tactical vest. They both had rifles with long sights, swiveling around to point at Cherabino.

“DeKalb PD,” Cherabino yelled with her gun up.

No hesitation; the front guard was aiming. Cherabino was in danger.

My old battle training kicked in. I reached into his brain, found the right spot, and had him out cold before he let out his breath.

Now the second rifle was swiveling toward me.

A second mind, this one with poorer valence, our minds meshing less well in the fabric of Mindspace; his finger was squeezing the trigger before I finished.

I dodged, and came back to his mind, hitting the right spot one more time with greater force. The asphalt where I had been standing exploded in a shower of debris. A piece hit my leg. Pain.

Two sleeping bodies in tactical gear slumped to the ground.

I cursed. “There's more coming,” I said. I could see the minds. “We shouldn't be here.”

“How many?” Cherabino cut me off, her hands out in front of her, aiming the gun, sweeping the area in front of her. An intense focus came from her mind. She was moving, absolute commitment to the project going forward.

“Three!” I limped after her, “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” repeating like a litany.

“DeKalb PD,” her voice came again, and the sound of a shot.

I was around the corner. Another guard was on the ground, jerking from the electrical shock. The green stun bullet stuck out from his shoulder. Cherabino kicked his gun away.

A large residential door stood open behind him, a metal-grate mesh security door latched behind it. Three bushes to the left, and a long gravel pathway moving behind the house.

Two more guards came from behind the house.

“Left!” Cherabino screamed, and was aiming.

I disabled the guy on the right, his body slumping down, into the nearest bush, strings cut like a marionette.

Burst of pain in Mindspace from the guy on the left she'd stunned. I winced, feeling his pain as my own. I was years out of practice in battle training. Years. I didn't have the pain tolerance or the focus I'd once had. This was a suicide mission.

I pulled myself out of Mindspace by sheer will, tired already.

But I couldn't let her go in alone.

She was in the middle of a side kick. Her back foot slammed into the mesh door, right by the lock, and it was open.

A person on the other side; I got a grip on his mind, disabled. Stars swam across my vision lightly as I limped after Cherabino, who wasn't slowing down.

Tile entryway, looked like, with a curved open doorway beyond, warm compared to the weather outside. A woman slumped on the floor, unconscious. A small trail of blood came from her forehead where she'd hit it on the way down. Crap. My fault.

Cherabino was through the doorway, moving quickly, and I followed, cursing. I was out of mental juice, without recharging for a few minutes. And it looked like she wasn't nearly out of stupidity yet. I had no choice; I followed her.

We were in a room with full-length glass display cases on three walls out of four, while heavy curtains covered the windows on the fourth. Bright lighting came from inside the cases, illuminating hundreds of objects each in turn, some large, some small. All had small tags beside them explaining what they were; the cases closest to me were dominated by smashed bricks, pieces of computers, and small, shriveled biologicals.

A late-forties man with graying blond hair and a small scar under his left eye looked up. An assistant type behind him, skinny guy with office wear, brought out a gun.

“Put the gun down, Detective Cherabino,” the late-forties man said. He had a quiet assurance about him, and a light trace of an educated Boston accent. I recognized the voice from the vision—this was Fiske. He was outfitted in a golf shirt and khakis by a rich man's designer, hundreds of ROCs for just the shirt, and a small chain around his right wrist that looked like platinum.

“Or what?” Cherabino said. For the first time, she had a twinge of doubt.

I felt the mind only seconds before he moved, and I couldn't get a grip on it fast enough to do anything.

A large bruiser came up behind her, a large-bore handgun hitting her temple lightly. “Or I shoot you.” He was angry at the damage to his fellows, with a strong enough untapped Ability that I could read him like a book in Mindspace without trying. He'd also be harder to knock out, dangerous on more than one level, and not someone I'd be willing to tackle without another ten minutes to reset. He'd be a hell of an enemy to piss off.

I felt Cherabino consider some judo move to flip him, and I got ready, rest or no rest. Then I sighed, backing down as she discarded the judo move as too risky with the gun in play and so close. On her mental query, I confirmed it was a gun and not another object of the same weight.

Cherabino lowered her own firearm, and the assistant type came forward to take it from her.

“You do
not
touch my family. My family's off-limits, and if you cross that line I will cross lines you've never heard of,” she said, her voice like a whip. “Back off,” she said, gun to her head, and yet, in that moment, she was dangerous.

Fiske frowned in displeasure. “I don't normally target the families of police, Detective Cherabino. I certainly can, I suppose, if you're going to invade my home. Mantel?”

The bruiser behind her said, “Yes, boss?”

Cherabino pulled away. “I have it on good authority you're planning to kidnap my nephew. I'm here to give you fair warning. If you touch him, I will kill you.” A burst of anger and determination. “Don't think I won't.”

The bruiser grabbed her arm again, forcing the gun uncomfortably into her temple. She was undeterred.

Fiske looked thoughtful. “You know, I actually believe you. Your information is bad, Detective. I don't have anything of the sort planned.” He waved vaguely at the door. “Take her outside, Mantel. Let her call her family to assure herself they're fine, but monitor the conversation. Don't hurt her unless she gives you trouble, but don't let her go. If she shows any sign of trouble or she talks out of turn, kill her.”

“Happy to, sir. What do you call trouble?” he asked, his brain thinking violence on many levels.

Fiske smiled the self-satisfied smile again. “See that she throws the first punch. Oh, and send Peterson in while you're out there.”

Cherabino swallowed. “Adam . . .”

Two more guards arrived and they took her away like a captive sheep, Mantel angry and scared of his boss, a combination that I thought made him all the more dangerous. I turned to follow, thinking I could calm him down. Maybe. Given enough time.

“Stop,” Fiske said, the command of a well-practiced leader with the power of life and death. “Adam Ward. You stay with me, for now. Your police detective doesn't have to stay intact.”

A guard came behind me, just far enough away to use his gun, making his presence very clear.

Cherabino was broadcasting low-level fear and anger and very intense attention. She thought she could probably overcome the one guy if she had to.

You okay?
I asked her.

Think so,
she said, trying to figure out if she believed Fiske. Trying to figure out if her warning had registered, and how she was going to get out of this.

Do I need to fight?
I asked, adding the fact that I probably couldn't knock anyone out for a few minutes yet.