The Embers Of My Heart (9 page)

I took that all in as she explained it. The moral of the story as I took it was not to fuck around with false memories unless you really needed to. Still, it gave me some hints as to how to tell if someone tweaked my memories. So far, I didn't think so, but there was a non-trivial chance that the Establishment was pushing people around by tweaking a memory here, a thought there.

"You should go back now," Absynthe said. She abruptly let go of my hands. "I believe you're about to have a visitor."

"A visitor?" She narrowed her eyes at me. "Oh. Yeah. I should talk to her."

"You should talk to her, yes." Absynthe's presence began to fade away. "And don't be an idiot and reveal everything you know."

I returned to my dorm room, unlocked the door with a telekinetic flick, and cleared the psionic power from my mind. Almost immediately, there was a tapping at my door, barely even a knock. "Come in," I called.

She opened the door and walked in. Not forcefully nor angrily, as I had expected. Instead she just shuffled in, pausing in the doorway to look at me. Her eyes were red and puffy. "Kevin? Are you...are you mad at me?"

"I'm not mad," I said. Part of me wanted to reach out to her. I couldn't.

"I was expecting to hear from you all day. I wanted to see you." Her voice was a little raspy. "You were going to come to my room with a rose, maybe a dozen, and give them to me. You were going to take me out to dinner and dancing. Something fancier than usual. We'd go out for a walk under the stars. I'd be cold. You'd hold me. Maybe you'd finally say you love me. Maybe. I didn't want to get my hopes up. But I was waiting for you all day."

"I'm sorry," I said. I didn't know if there was anything else I could say.

"I waited all day," she repeated. "Kaitlyn told me that Max and Jess were going out, and then how Lisa and Drew were going out, and then Andreas came down and gave her a flower, and they were going out, and she was so happy, and then he left and she just looked at me and gave me a hug and told me how sorry she was." Her voice broke and she stifled a sob. "She felt so bad for me and she asked me to go with her. I didn't want to be a third wheel. I wanted to be with you. I told her no, I told her you'd be over any minute now, so she left and I was alone and you never came. Why didn't you come, Kevin? Why?"

"Nikki, do you remember what happened last year?"

"Last year?"

"On Valentine's Day last year."

"We had that party, right?" She sounded slightly confused.

"We went for a walk," I said. "I told you I was interested. You told me you had a boyfriend."

I watched closely for her reaction. Her lips twitched and her eyes suddenly slid to the side before focusing back on me. "Oh. Him." Two fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. "That was then. This is now."

"You never even told me his name."

"His name?" Her lips moved again without saying anything. "I didn't. He's not-"

"Real?"

"What?"

"He's not real."

"How did you know that?" she whispered.

"You just told me."

Her expression shifted from dismay to confusion to anger. "Seriously? What the hell, Kevin? Why are you suddenly thinking about this?"

"Why didn't you tell me the truth?" I asked. "You could have just told me you weren't interested. Or just deflected it somehow. Why'd you lead me on, put me in the friend zone?"

"Why is this coming up now?" She looked like she couldn't decide between screaming and crying. "Holy shit. That was a year ago, I was confused, and things were so different. Why today of all days? You could have come up with this yesterday or tomorrow or never and it would be so much better. Why do you have to ruin this day for me?"

"Because I can't enjoy this day with that on my mind," I said.

"So you're going to ruin it for me because you can't get over the past?" She crossed her arms over her stomach. "That's fucked up. I don't understand. It was a year ago. We didn't know each other that well, I didn't know you had powers, I didn't want to get involved with someone as nice as you if I had to keep so much of my life from you. Is that enough for you? Is that what you wanted to know?"

"It would have been nice to know that before."

"When the fuck would it have come up? Kevin, what is the point of this?"

"The point is trust." As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt sick. I hoped it didn't show on my face.

"Trust? Well, you can deal with your damn trust issues by yourself, in your room, in the dark. I hope you're happy with yourself." She spun around and stormed out. The door slammed shut behind her.

Chapter Six

The call to action came in the middle of the night. It catapulted me out of a painful dream involving Nikki, Star, and garden shears, into a dim chamber full of shadowy figures and a spotlight shining down on me. I covered my eyes and winced. "The hell?"

"Good evening," said a familiar voice. A table materialized and Absynthe sat down across from me. Instead of her normal casual telepresence, she wore what I could only call a uniform. "Mr. Parker, the Establishment has work for you. We apologize for the dramatic awakening."

"You got my attention," I said. "What's up?"

"A simple task we would normally send a team on. Unfortunately, our primary agents are required for additional work, and your normal partner has bluntly refused to work with you." Absynthe smiled without any warmth. "I believe her exact words were 'Let him rot in hell'."

"Ouch."

"While I don't want to pry too deeply into your personal life, you need to talk with her."

"I sure do." A week after Valentine's Day, neither of us had yet said a word to the other.

"If this situation continues, we may need to re-evaluate your mental states."

"I thought you weren't going to pry too deeply into my personal life."

Her smile warmed slightly. "Apologize to her."

"I'm planning on it."

"Good. Moving on-"

"Wait a moment." I waved at all the shadowy figures standing around us. "What's with all this?"

"Observers. Alistair wanted witnesses to make sure your orders were unambiguous. You've had difficulty staying on target before."

I resisted the urge to flip them all off. Nikki wanted to keep the researcher alive, and now I was paying for it. "Fine, fine, let's get going on this. What's the task?"

"We've received intelligence that the Order of Chaos is planning a biological attack in Albany. We believe this is an attempt to assert that they're an actual threat, instead of a joke." She shook her head. "They're compromised on practically all levels."

"Some biological weapon?" I asked. "Sounds nasty. So you want me to take out their agent before it goes off?"

"No," Absynthe said. "You're a trainee and even if the Order is not particularly dangerous, their loyalists are fanatics. We're not sending you into direct combat."

"So what's my job, then?"

"We know their plans, so we've developed an airborne vaccine. Your job is to release that vaccine in downtown Albany tomorrow morning. We're on a tight schedule since their agent is on the way and we expect him by the end of next week. Our specialists say we need at least a week for our vaccine to spread enough to provide sufficient immunity."

"Wait, a vaccine that spreads?" I asked.

Absynthe nodded. "Their bio-agent is a psionically modified virus. Ours is similar, but designed to protect against their particular virus."

I frowned. "Seems like either way, a lot of people are going to get sick."

"Our way, people get mild cold-like symptoms for a couple of days, maybe. Their way, they get dead." Absynthe shrugged.

"How did we figure out how to block it so easily?" I asked. "I'm not a biologist or doctor, but I know making up a vaccine on short notice isn't something we can just pull out of our asses."

She sighed and there was obvious unrest among the shadowy figures. "Our intelligence noted that their modifications were to the smallpox virus. Smallpox vaccines are common. With the data provided from our intelligence, we were able to modify a standard smallpox vaccine to block their virus."

I shrugged. I thought smallpox died out well before I was born, but if anyone had stockpiles, it would be major governments and psionic organizations. Biokinesis could touch neurotransmitters, so it wasn't too surprising to find that it could modify a virus as well. "Sure. So how am I spreading this vaccine, and where am I getting it?"

"It'll be waiting outside your door when you leave this morning. It should be self-explanatory."

"Great. What time do I need to leave?"

"Early." She smiled widely. "We can arrange a wake-up call."

"Please don't. I need my beauty sleep."

The observers began to blink out until only Absynthe and I remained. When the last shadow faded out, she tapped long fingernails on the table. "Now it's time to tell you how much of a god damn fool you are."

I shrugged. "I tell myself that every day."

The table vanished. Absynthe walked through the gap and slapped me hard enough to make my ears ring. If this hadn't been telepresence, I'd have a welt for days. "You broke my trust."

"I tricked her into admitting it. Loaded questions. She can't prove it."

"She doesn't need to prove it. You put tension on the relationship between her and me and that's unacceptable. What on earth were you thinking?" She leaned toward me. "Are you trying to be an asshole so she breaks up with you? If that's the case, I'm referring you to Alistair for a serious mental evaluation. That is not behavior we want to see from one of our trainees."

"And she doesn't catch shit for anything she does?"

"What has she done? She didn't want to get involved with you until she found out about your powers. Many of our kind feel the same way. Relationships with normal people don't work, Kevin."

I shook my head. "It's not that."

"Then what is it?"

"I can't explain it."

"If you can't explain it, how do you expect us to figure it out?" She shook her head. "Stop being a child. Apologize to her. She's hurt and upset and you both need to consider where you're going from here."

"I know. I just haven't been able to do it."

"For fuck's sake." She pulled her chair up to me and sat down hard. "You hurt her. If you value your relationship, if you value her, if you value your own decency, you will apologize. If you don't, you're going to lose her. And me."

"I realize that, but how? Just go to her, say I'm sorry for being a dick, and get on with things?" Losing Absynthe shook me more than I wanted to admit. In a way, I feared losing her more than Nikki.

She shook her head again. "That's a good start. Then you listen to her. Just shut up and listen to what she has to say. Maybe she'll want to work things out. Maybe she won't. But at least you'll be doing the right thing by her."

"I'll try."

Absynthe rolled her eyes and unceremoniously dumped me from her telepresence. I found myself back in bed, green light flickering across the ceiling as I opened my eyes, fading away in seconds. I looked to the side, saw that it was just past five-thirty in the morning. There was no way I could fall back asleep now. I threw the blanket off and padded over to my computer in bare feet so I could log into PSInet. Max and Drew were sound asleep and after a moment of thought, I used a clumsy technique to muffle the sound of my typing.

My initial search was for the Order of Chaos. I didn't expect much from an organization with such a silly name, but the search results populated with far more data than I had anticipated. I checked through half a dozen sites, but the Illuminati archives were the most interesting.

The history of the Order was extensive. I had assumed that psionic power and organizations to be modern, but the Order dated back to the Romans and there were implications they caused the collapse of the empire. Side notes indicated circumstantial evidence of their presence dated back to biblical times, but not enough conclusive proof to be sure. The authors of the study contrasted them with the Illuminati and the Kaze, both of which had their own roots in the same time period, but had grown in much different directions.

If the Order was so old, why did we dismiss them as such a joke? The answer lay with the Illuminati once again. During the late Middle Ages, they had extensively infiltrated the Order and collapsed their structure. The current Order was a shadow of its former self with entirely new goals. "In summary, the new Order of Chaos has left behind its old goal of maintaining a barrier between the psionic and non-psionic populations in favor of seemingly random attacks. Their lack of focus and self-preservation keeps their numbers down, and their extremely lax membership policies ensure that many of their new members are spies or informants."

It made sense now. They acted like psionic terrorists. Their successful operations typically ended with the death or twisting of their agents. If they stopped dying in the process, they'd be much more dangerous. That led to my assignment. It didn't seem to be a typical Order move based on what I had read. It might mean they were moving away from the suicidal acts into substantially more dangerous areas. Bio-terrorism was no joke. I kept reading and found the potential answer. They organized in a cell structure. If a particularly smart and dangerous cell acquired the resources, they could pull this off. Based on what I had been told, they must have been partially compromised already, so I just needed to stop the plan and trained agents could finish off the cell at their leisure.

Still, something was strange about this. I closed my PSInet connection and glanced at the clock. I'd spent close to an hour reading their history. Max would be up in about a half hour for an early class, and I needed to get out before he left. I sent a quick telepathic message to Absynthe to try for a couple of answers. There was no response. Either she was asleep or ignoring me.

I sighed and decided to take the risk. Contacting Nikki would let me apologize and see what she thought. I reached out with telepresence to see if she was awake. To my surprise, she was, and her mental realm swirled into place around me nearly instantly. It was dark and brooding and she was definitely not happy. "What."