Marked (9 page)

I can keep a secret. You know that.

“Give us a minute?” she said out loud.

“I was just leaving anyway,” I said, a bit worried. “Good to see you again, Agent Ruffins.” It wasn't, but it was the standard greeting.

Ruffins watched me all the way out the door, and I piggybacked on the Link with Cherabino long enough to make sure she was okay before I got out of easy range. I could “listen in” on her through the Link at any time, but it became more work as we were farther apart, the noise of the universe adding up between us. Cherabino liked this effect, as it gave her her much-lauded mental privacy. I hated it because trading too much on the Link despite the distance strengthened it, like pairing two particles in a quantum state. And I'd promised I'd let her go eventually.

The wind blew, cutting through all my layers of clothing, and I shivered again. At least my hands were warm.

•   •   •

Swartz met me at the coffee bar, already in our usual booth when I walked in. A cane leaned against the booth next to him, a dark, inlaid-wood antique I'd bought for him a few weeks ago. I'd said it was to give him something interesting to lug around and whap people with, but the truth was, I hadn't been able to stand the look of the geriatric five-footed white formed-resin cane he'd been carrying before. It made him look weak, and old.

Just a few weeks before, he'd been knocked to the ground by a heart attack, and every time I saw him face-to-face, it hit me again. He looked frail, like he'd aged ten years in a few months. The doctors said he was lucky, lucky to be alive, lucky to be recovering so quickly, lucky not to have had the brain damage they'd been expecting. But he hadn't been lucky. He hadn't been a candidate for an artificial heart. He had been a hairbreadth from dying. And you could still see it on his face.

So I'd traded everything I'd ever earned and more besides—incurring a debt to the people I hated most, the Guild, to arrange for him to be treated by a Guild medic who could repair the heart with microkinesis. It wasn't perfect; he was frail, and would likely be frail forever now, but he was alive. I'd do what they asked to pay that debt, because I'd said so. Because they'd saved Swartz's life and I owed them for it.

“You're late,” Swartz said, just barely loud enough to be heard.

“Three minutes,” I said, and scanned the faces of the other people there just in case. All the time with the cops had rubbed off on me, sure, but what really made me check a room before I entered was the months I'd spent with no telepathy at all. I'd temporarily burned out my Ability and I'd been a normal like everyone else, and even now it was hard to break that instinctive feeling of wariness.

I stopped by the bar to pick up our drinks. The bartender, a burly man with a faded navy tattoo and a beard, looked up from an antique paperback labeled
TOM SAWYER
, to point to a metal tray a few feet to his left. The thing was stained from years of use, but if you looked closely, you saw it was scrupulously clean. On top was an ugly ceramic pot and two uglier cups.

“Decaf?” I asked.

He nodded. “Licorice is a little stronger to make up.”

“Thanks.” I set my papers on one side of the tray, rearranging so everything else was on the other side. Sad part was, it balanced. The papers were that thick. I picked up the tray and bused it to our table.

Bartender was getting lazy, but what did I care? I set the tray down, its metal edges scraping the old wooden table, the scrapes adding to generations of others. Then I started pouring the dark licorice coffee.

“Three things,” Swartz said. Every week for the last—well, forever—he'd asked me to come up with three things I was grateful for.

“The smell of late fall in the air. Peanut brittle soy-chocolate muffins. And gloves—Cherabino gave me gloves. Good gloves. Maybe too good gloves.” My voice had gotten soft on the last. I straightened, and busied myself arranging things and finishing up the coffee.

Swartz looked at me. Just looked. “They're gloves. I'm a little out of touch with the current market, but I don't imagine they're worth much of your particular brand of poison.”

I shrugged, pretending it didn't matter.

“Why did she give you gloves?” Swartz asked me as I scooted into the old leather booth, its surface cracking audibly. A homey sound.

I sipped the coffee. Hot, and the fragrant licorice stung my sinuses and filled up my head. I coughed, a little. Too much would be unmanly. “Ahem. For my birthday.”

“Ah,” he said. “That is about now, isn't it?”

I looked up, expecting him to have a little package wrapped in recycled paper waiting for me. Instead he just looked embarrassed.

He'd forgotten. He'd forgotten? Swartz had forgotten my birthday?

He rubbed at his chest absently. The coffee sat untouched in front of him. He looked pale and tired. His thoughts were slow, limping along without any force behind them.

In an effort gargantuan in its selflessness, I forced myself to think about him. It hadn't been that long ago he'd had major heart surgery. He probably didn't even remember what week it was, or what month. He was in pain. There were reasons he'd forgotten my birthday. Real reasons. And he'd shown up late at night for me anyway. There was no need to be an ass.

“Adam, I'm sorry—”

“It's fine. Really. I was going to ask, how's the breathing?”

He blinked, thought, concern floating over his brain, and finally settled. He took the out. “Better. Doctor says it's a good thing I quit smoking. Saved my life. Still can't make it up the stairs without a rest break.” He made a face. “But at least it's only one now.”

“I'm glad you're feeling better.” The smoking hadn't had a lot to do with it, of course, but I hadn't told him, and his wife likely didn't have the words. “Any news as to when you can go back to teaching?”

“I've got to manage to stay awake the whole day first,” Swartz said. “It's not going to be this semester.” He looked down at the coffee, still untouched.

I caught the edge of the information-thought: doctor said he couldn't have caffeine. He wanted the licorice, but his chest still hurt too much to be stupid about something like that.

“It's decaf,” I said.

“I still can't—”

“It's fine. I'll get you an herbal tea.” I stood up and went over to the bar, angry with myself. I should have remembered. I should have! But nothing was normal anymore. Nothing. Damn it.

I returned with a stupid cinnamon apple thing in a tall floral china cup, and set it gently in front of his side of the table. Thing would break if I looked at it wrong.

“I'm not an invalid!” he barked at me, and coughed.

“And I'm not usually an idiot. Drink the tea.”

He stared me down and finally took a sip.

“Time for us to do our reading yet?” I asked, twitchy, not sure what to do. Usually he was a lot more in charge. Usually he would be making me feel better.

He swallowed and set the china cup down gingerly. “She gave you gloves, you said? Does she usually give you a birthday present?”

“Well, no.” I frowned at him. I wanted to talk about missing the meeting earlier in the week. I wanted him to pull the situation with the Guild out of me. Instead he was harping about gloves? I was trying not to think about the gloves. Or overthink the gloves.

“What do you think the change in behavior means?” he asked carefully.

“I don't know,” I said quickly.

“Ah,” he said.

“No, really, I don't know, not for sure. And anyway, you were the one who told me I couldn't have a relationship until I could keep a plant alive.” I had another four bioluminescent plants on my windowsill at the apartment this week, two of which were clearly dying. I had high hopes for the fourth one, which was only a little droopy.

“Maybe I was wrong about that,” Swartz said.

And the world tilted on its axis. “Wh-wh-what?”

He looked at the stupid china cup pensively. “I've been thinking a lot about life, since I almost lost mine. I don't know what I would have done without Selah. Not just because she was there, all the time, in the hospital, at home. But when it was me on that floor with doom barreling in on me, when it all went to hell, I thought I had to get through this for Selah. I couldn't leave her alone. I'm not afraid of death, you know that. God and I are on good terms. But I fought—and fought hard—to stay with her. I'm still fighting.”

He looked up. “You need a reason to fight, kid.”

“I have reasons to fight. A lot of them. We go through this every year.” I squashed down the unrealistic hope. He'd been through a lot. It was completely understandable he wanted to talk about it. “Cherabino's great, she is, but—”

“You're in love with her,” Swartz said flatly.

I stared. He'd never . . . “So what if I am? I'm a work in progress. ‘Adding another person to that mix is just making it harder to put the pieces together and might do more harm than good.' That's a direct quote from you.”

“Ask her out,” Swartz said. “This isn't some random person off the street—it's your partner. You've worked with her for years. She's seen you at your worst.”

A huge black hole of possibility settled into my soul at that moment, me bracing myself against the gravitational pull of this idea . . . this thing. I wouldn't be able to resist it forever, and I already had the Guild and Clark to deal with. “Swartz, if this is a test . . .”

“It's not,” he said flatly. “Worse comes to worst, she says no, and you end up right back here where you are. Best case, she says yes. You get a chance to answer some questions you've had for a long time.”

“What if it . . .” I trailed off. He didn't have to tell me. We'd talked about the thing with Kara enough. Despite her betrayal, the pang of seeing her married and all the anger I still carried about it sometimes, I wouldn't go back and undo the time we'd spent together. I couldn't see me feeling any different about Cherabino.

“There's no sense staring at the problem,” Swartz said. “Your brain's an enemy in this case. Ask her. This week. I'll expect a full report at our next meeting.” He rubbed his chest, absently, and leaned forward with the help of a hand on the table. “Now, let's do the reading before Selah comes back to fuss at me for being out too long.”

With everything in the whole world different in the space of a few minutes, I nodded like a puppet and pulled out the Big Book without question. Reading about other people's experiences with alcohol and drug recovery might help. It might not, not today. But it was something we did.

•   •   •

Swartz dropped me off at the apartment, and I climbed the stairs, exhausted. I still checked Mindspace and my own senses before I opened the door; I'd had too many unexpected visitors in the last few months.

Seemed clean, although I had a message light on the answering machine. I pressed the button.

“Hi, Adam, it's Kara,” it began. “I'm so glad you got out okay. I didn't mean to—”

I hit
ERASE
.

CHAPTER 9

Feeling like an
idiot, I put on a hat and sunglasses and a coat against the weather and found my way to Freedom Park via the MARTA station nearby. This time of year, in mid-November, the bone-deep chill had settled into the wind, and even the tree line, trunks twisted waist-high from the Tech Wars, couldn't shield me from it completely. Seemed awfully early to be out in this kind of cold, especially on a Saturday.

I settled down into a park bench designed to look like a smoothly curving shell of some kind; it was surprisingly comfortable, if a little cold and covered in graffiti. The arch fit my back nicely.

Around me, flat grass was dotted by the occasional line of trees and stones, some landscaper's idea of “natural” surroundings. A running path led out to the left, a bank to the right separating the park from the edges of Freedom Parkway, a mammoth concrete-set road that rivaled the nearby Interstate 75/85 for sheer weight. Flyers darted in their lanes above the parkway, but the area in grass and stone around me was empty. Completely empty; it was too cold for casual park-going.

In front of me, the Tech Wars Memorial stood, a large twisting sculpture made out of ceramic and metal, with water flowing in smooth arcs around a flat panel, the water manipulated via antigravity fields into impossible shapes. That central panel, cradled in the curves of the water, the ceramic, and the metal, held all the names of those in metro Atlanta who'd died during the initial days of the Tech Wars, as a direct result of the actions of a madman. The ones who'd crashed when their automatic cars failed. The ones who'd starved to death or suffocated in their smart homes. The ones whose brains were eaten by viruses gone blood-borne. And the ones killed in bombs set off from military computers without their owners' knowledge or okay.

There were similar memorials in every major city left in North America, with lists of names as long as this one.

The names were just barely large enough to read from a few feet. There were four columns on the display on both sides, four columns more than five feet tall. It sobered you, to see such a list. Made you think your own problems were small, even if you didn't have anyone you could talk to about them.

I settled back and watched the spiraling waterfalls as they moved through the sculpture. Time passed. I put my rapidly chilling hands in my coat pockets—and they hit the gloves. I smiled without meaning to and pulled them on.

A mind neared, focused on me in particular and I looked up. The human mind was hardwired to detect that kind of focus, which was why even normals noticed you staring at them. A survival mechanism. In the case of telepaths, survival was not a theoretical concept.

I stood. “Edgar Stone.”

He stood, gruffly, hands in the pockets of his antique leather jacket, a faux-fur hat covering most of his head. “Adam Ward.”

“Please, sit,” I said, gesturing at the park bench.

He shook his head. “I'll stand, thanks.” Too cold, his mind leaked. Didn't want a chilled seat on top of chilled fingers.

“I'm getting quite a few stray thoughts from you,” I said politely.

His face went blank, and I suddenly couldn't see anything in Mindspace but a heavy, shiny mirror. “I am not a student. Watch yourself.”

Crap, offending him was not my intention.

“What was it you invited me here for in the first place?” I asked.

“Apparently you pulled quite a privacy violation the other day.”

“That was exaggerated,” I said.

“Maybe.”

Was I leaking? I checked my shields again. No, still locked up tight, without even the Guild-standard public space.

“I expect you to conform to the highest standards of ethics during our investigation,” Stone said. “I'd be a lot happier with your police partner, to be honest.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“Unfortunately I was overruled. It's felt that if you step out of line, the Guild still has the right to kill you. This is very comforting to some.”

“Nelson, I take it.” I added in subtext that Kara suspected him.

Stone shrugged. “Be that as it may, you were expelled for improper behavior and massive betrayal of the Guild's ideals. There are some who would rather not see you back.”

“I've never liked the way they put that. It was a drug habit, not sexual misconduct.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“It matters to me!” I took a breath. He was deliberately being difficult. “Listen, I just—”

“You've been assigned to go into the middle of an Enforcement investigation, with a full madness lockdown, and screw with vital evidence—including people's memories and mental states, directly or indirectly—in the middle of a Guild you now have no part of. Having just proven your ethics have slipped in the last few years. I am concerned.”

“Sure, my ethics have slipped when it comes to self-defense,” I said. “I fight dirty. I do what it takes to survive. If that's going to bother your high-and-mighty ethics, then—”

“You saw it as self-defense?” he interrupted. “The privacy violation.”

“He was manhandling me at the time,” I said.

“That's not how he tells it, and Kara's testimony has been declared invalid.”

“Why the hell? Kara's a levelheaded bureaucrat. Wait. Did she speak for me?”

“She's also the grieving survivor of a controversial death that's being quarantined as a public health issue,” Stone said. “And she hasn't been the most levelheaded lady lately. Calling you is a perfect example. It's believed she may have been contaminated. She's under house arrest. And yeah, she spoke up for you loud and clear. Almost obsessively so.”

I was surprised, and oddly pleased, that she'd spoken for me. Even so, I said, “Did you call me out here in the cold to insult me? A hell of a way to start a working relationship.”

A pause, during which I watched the gravity-assisted water float around its tracks.

“Here's the thing,” Stone said. “The Guild is a political tangle right now. We have major factions fighting for control of the future course of the organization, and none of them are playing nice.”

“I'm listening.”

“Rex is trying to use you as a pawn,” Stone said flatly. “And the ethical violation . . . I need to know you're not some kind of hired spy working for Guild First or one of the families. Especially with the kind of madness potentially in play.”

“What kind of madness? What kinds are there?”

“I need to know you're not some hired spy.”

I laughed. “A spy? Really? That's ridiculous. I'm here ultimately because Kara called me. Yeah, I have a debt to pay, and yeah, half the world is threatening me to get me here, but so what? I do, actually, believe in innocent until proven guilty. Let's find out what happened.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then nodded. “And the ethics?”

“I've been working in the interview rooms long enough to believe that people will tell you what they're thinking eventually with words and body language without you doing a thing. Will I go rummaging around in heads willy-nilly? I'm not planning to. Why, will you?”

“Now you're insulting me.”

I shivered as a particularly cold gust of wind blew some of the fountain water at me. “Let's call it even. What kind of madness are we talking about here? I need to know what I'm getting into.” And how likely it was I was going to end up in Mental Health, or down in that cell again.

You really believe in innocent until proven guilty?
Subtext he sent along with the words implied a provincial point of view. A naive lie the normals told themselves, not how the world worked.

I do, actually,
I sent back, along with the overtones you only got with a deep-held truth.
Evidence and innocent until proven guilty.

You've worked for the normals too long,
he sent, with a slight overtone of dark amusement,
but that does, actually, make you neutral. I can work with that.

“The madness,” I prompted.

“Fine,” he said. “They're thinking it's another North Rim.”

I waited.

He said nothing.

“What's North Rim?” I asked.

“You don't know about North Rim? North Rim, Arizona. Twenty-five years after the end of the Tech Wars. The Guild researcher enclave.”

I racked my brain for ancient school lessons. “You mean the people who researched Ability? The second generation? Went off into the desert and figured out training and mind structure and such.”

“That's the one.”

“Could we move this along?” I asked. “I'm freezing my balls off out here. And I need to know.”

“There's no reason to teach schoolchildren about how North Rim ended. At least there wasn't.”

“Okay?”

“For the first few years, they were effective. Their disciplines kept getting results and showing us how to better train, how to improve, how to do practically everything with the mind that we know today. Individuals came and went from that commune over a decade, out there in the desert. But then they found a new technique that destroyed the mind's natural barrier to madness, or they ran into something that amplified their deepest fears and used it against them, or they uncovered a deep mental flaw in the new recruits in the worst way possible. Nobody knows. Whatever happened, someone came down with the first recorded case of madness, a new kind of madness. And then it started spreading. Out of a commune of twenty-eight people, all but three died. One of those was the park ranger at the canyon visitor center. She holed herself up in the station and didn't leave. But the other two made it halfway to Vegas and infected over a hundred fifty other people before they shut it down.”

I processed that. “How did they shut it down?”

“They killed anyone infected. Dead. And quarantined anyone who'd come in contact with them until they showed symptoms. The St. George town sheriff remembered the Tech Wars, was a stubborn old bastard, and he pulled the trigger nearly every single time himself. He stopped it, with brute force. After five rounds of contagion.”

“Five?” I asked, and laughed. “Ludicrous. The odds of anyone infecting another telepath, much less a normal, at more than one remove are tiny. Tiny. It's the foundation of all the mental health procedures at the Guild.”

“With everything except this. The madness spread from person to person in a chain. Quick. It didn't take repeated exposure, and some of the normals were affected too, mind-to-mind, though they couldn't spread it. Violence came with the illness, homicide and suicide both. Nobody knows what it was. We've never seen anything like it. They still wonder what would have happened if that sheriff hadn't stopped it at the end of a gun.”

Suddenly it seemed a lot colder out here. “No cure, then?”

“None that we know of.”

“Okay. Why—why do you think it's not a regular kind of mental health transmission right now?” I asked. “Normal person-to-person influence and power of suggestion? The Guild's notorious for spreading power of suggestion throughout the population. Isn't that more likely?”

“We don't know anything yet. And no matter what the politicians say, Nelson isn't going to let executions start until we're sure. If it wasn't for the outbreak in Antarctica eight years ago, we wouldn't even be—”

“What?” I asked. “When was this?”

He looked at me. “That's right, you weren't with the Guild then. They managed to keep it quiet from the normals. Fifty-seven deaths, the last fourteen from a ship docked on the last day. There was only one survivor, a low-level telepath, and he killed all fourteen before killing himself. They say it's spread by deep mind-to-mind, anything past the public space.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. That's why the hullabaloo about the ‘privacy violation.'”

“Yes. It's a Guild First policy, but there's a reason for it. Most of the Guild has adopted it wholeheartedly.” He looked around, then sent me a picture of the official Guild aircar, over the ridge. “We should get back.”

“Are they really calling for executions?” I asked suddenly.

“It's not innocent until proven guilty at the Guild,” Stone said quietly. “It's truth, and whatever is good for the majority.”

“As defined by those in power,” I said.

“As defined by Enforcement, largely, me and my fellows,” Stone said. “There's a reason we're separate from the rest of the Guild power structure.”

He started walking, and I followed.

I was cynical about the Guild's system, all too cynical. It bothered me that Stone—a decent guy, from what I could see—could buy in to it so easily. Innocent until proven guilty and evidence really did matter. The Guild's way assigned blame quickly, then mind-scanned to determine if they were correct. Some of those reads were so clumsy that the suspects were lucky to get off with a two-day migraine. Sometimes they'd been known to lose memories, or have a personality shift for weeks or months or permanently. Damage was routinely done by Enforcement, if needed to find out a truth you were hiding from them or from yourself. I liked trials, I liked innocent until proven guilty, even if the result was less certain. But I also liked walking around without someone else's madness in my head.

“You realize that we expect excellent work in exchange for a payment on your debt,” Stone said conversationally.

In other words, he reminded me who held my leash. “I do good work,” I said.

•   •   •

Stone parked in the member-only garage on the back side of the Guild's main skyscraper. Two other buildings towered to our left, with the lower garden area jutting out of the tallest one halfway up. The garage, which should have been half-empty and buzzing with people going to and fro (in the present and in Mindspace), was strangely empty of all emotion.