The Handler (4 page)

It was like pushing on a cloud, but I cleared enough of the colors to sense a ball of pure white survival instinct buried in the center.
That
I knew what to do with. Gripping the ball of white, hard, I crushed it into nothingness, obliterating it into a vacuum that sucked in and subdued the other mess
.

Serena turned the gun sideways, peering at it. “I don’t particularly like guns. Beastly weapons, cold and brutish. I much prefer the mind. Yes, much tidier that way. No mess whatsoever, except when things go pear-shaped, and that was hardly my fault. No one could blame me for that. Could happen to anyone.” She was talking to herself, in that no-filter stream-of-consciousness that happened with people I had handled completely, decoupling the barrier between their conscious and subconscious until they were controlled by their instincts.

I stood close to her now. “I think you want to give that to me.”

She smiled brightly. It was a wide, innocent smile, and it tore a small piece of my soul. She handed me the gun.

“I’m sorry it turned out this way, Serena.” I meant every word. I’d made a terrible mistake with her.

“Which way?”

Her questioning green eyes flew wide when I shot the dart into her chest.

I scrambled to catch her, easing her slowly down, so she wouldn’t bang her pretty head on the concrete floor. Anna, released from Serena’s hold, bolted up from her seat at the table. She grabbed the other gun and pointed it at Serena’s limp body on the ground.

“It’s all right,” I said.

Sasha’s eyes were bright and alert now, fear wild in them as he took in the situation. “How did you…” He held a hand up, palm out to Serena, as if to ward her off, even though she was passed out. “No one was able to stop her before.”

“I almost couldn’t,” I whispered, folding Serena’s arms across her chest and straightening up from the floor. My mission was to save jackers like her, liberate them, make their lives better. I wanted to bring them hope, but some jackers wouldn’t believe in our cause. Some would refuse to fight for more than themselves. Worse, some would prey on others. There was no justice system for jackers, no prison that could hold someone like Serena, save the Feds, and she was probably better off dead than undergoing their experiments. I could simply shoot her, remove the threat that she posed, but my stomach churned, holding that thought in my mind while looking at her peaceful face. If I was unwilling to kill her, letting her continue to menace others was equally unacceptable.

I took a deep breath and slowly faced Sasha. Every revolution had casualties along the way—I just didn’t expect them to come so early. “Sometimes you have to fire the weapon, Sasha.” He shook his head, taking a half step back, but I wasn’t talking about him.

I was talking about me.

I reached deep into Serena’s unconscious mind, still a boiling mass, handling away every instinct that I could figure out and pushing aside the rest. It wasn’t difficult to find, the twined red and black instinct I had seen snake across her mind before. A pre-mindreading psychologist had called it the death drive
.
I thought of it as an anti-life impulse that lurked in every mind, usually muted and buried under that hard ball of pure white survival instinct. Except in some people, it wasn’t buried so deep. I should have known there was something wrong with her when I saw it the first time. The chaos of her mind made a certain amount of sense now: with that death drive so close to the surface, warring with her survival instinct, it was a kind of mental self-torture.

And I was about to make it worse.

I pulled up her death drive, strengthened it, and fashioned a new trigger for it. Every instinct has many triggers: visual cues, sounds, even smells can dredge up an instinctual response from the depths of the mind. For Serena, her death drive would now be sparked by any mental contact with another jacker. It would flare through her other instincts, causing a firestorm that would likely short-circuit her mind. It might drive her insane, and I couldn’t be sure that she would survive it, but it would disable her from harming anyone else.

And it was better than killing her outright.

Anna could erase her memories, including any knowledge of us and other jackers’ whereabouts. Then we would release her somewhere remote, maybe downstate Illinois, in hopes that she wouldn’t stumble across any jackers accidentally.

At least for a while.

Sasha banged in the back of the factory, clearing racks. Anna had returned from releasing Serena into the wild. A black mood had descended on me. I scooped up the screen off the kitchen table and flopped on the couch, ignoring both Sasha’s motions around the factory, as well as Anna’s frowns and blaring protective instinct.

The tru-cast was still paused where Anna had stopped it before.

Kira Moore’s voice sprung from the screen, the shaky camera image still focused on her impassioned face, bright blue eyes shining like an angel. “I was kidnapped by the FBI, brought here, and then sent to a prison with hundreds of other kids just like me. For no other reason than who I am.” She panned the camera across the changelings, who were wrestling with a couple of med-techs behind her. The changelings’ hospital gowns twisted around their thin frames as their small hands grasped at the med-techs’ uniforms and their bare feet pawed the tiled floor. They were fighting, mentally and physically, to escape from the hospital and the heinous experiments being conducted on them.

Fighting for their right to exist.

“I’m taking these kids out of here,” Kira was saying, “back home to their families, where they belong.”

I paused the screen with a mental nudge. Rewound it, played it again. And again.

Slowly the tightness in my chest eased. This was what it was all about. This was the fight my parents spent their lives preparing us for, and I was fully committed to it, no matter what difficulties lay ahead. No matter the casualties along the way. I would find the right jackers—full of determination, like Sasha and this girl who had started everything—and we would build the army needed to see the fight through to the end. So that mindjackers like us would have a home to come to. A place to belong.

Someday.

If you enjoyed
The Handler
, please
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 And don't miss Sasha's story in
The Scribe.

If you’ve read this story before any other Mindjack works, there's much more:

Mindjack Trilogy (novels) and Mindjack Origins (shorts)

Recommended Reading Order

Mind Games
(short story)

Open Minds
(Book One)

Closed Hearts
(Book Two)

The Handler
(short novella)

The Scribe
(short novella)

Free Souls
(Book Three)

coming soon

find all of Susan’s stories here

Book One of the Mindjack Trilogy

When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep.

Sixteen-year-old Kira Moore is a zero, someone who can't read thoughts or be read by others. Zeros are outcasts who can't be trusted, leaving her no chance with Raf, a regular mindreader and the best friend she secretly loves. When she accidentally controls Raf's mind and nearly kills him, Kira tries to hide her frightening new ability from her family and an increasingly suspicious Raf. But lies tangle around her, and she's dragged deep into a hidden underworld of mindjackers, where having to mind control everyone she loves is just the beginning of the deadly choices before her.

“
Open Minds
pushed me to the edge of my imagination and then tossed me over the edge as I screamed for more. When you can literally control the thoughts of others, how far will you go?” —
Michelle Davidson Argyle
, author of
Monarch
and
Cinders

Buy
Open Minds
Now

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Mindjack Trilogy website

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