The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (30 page)

Chapter 22

Finales Aren’t
Always Grand

Rachel wasn’t the only unexpected
addition to the interview. Lou sprawled in a lawn chair in front of me, and
Uncle Herman twiddled the dials of a computerized contraption perched on a
stack of hay bales. It was approximately the size of whatever had been in the
duffle bag I’d lugged to the picnic for him today. A long, orange cord trailed
from the back of the machine into the depths of the loft. A massive tower of
bales mounded against the back wall, and straw littered the plank floor.
Otherwise the loft was empty.

“It is hot as Hades up here.” Lou
fanned her perspiring face with a biodegradable paper plate. The flowers in her
pinned-up hairdo had wilted.

“You think this is bad? Try
sprinting from the house to the barn,” Rachel said. Dust powdered her white
tennis shoes, and moisture darkened several area on her pink shirt. She must
have been the person I’d glimpsed earlier.

“Did anybody see you leave with
her?” Lou asked Clint.

“Sammie did, so you need to
handle her as soon as possible, but Rachel shielded us until we got to the
road. Nobody noticed us go.”

What was he talking about? Lou
obviously understood, because she said, “Good. The lookouts are in position.
Let’s get this over with.”

“My newsletter interview?” I
asked, my brain unable to process the situation.

“Oh, Cleo.” Lou hoisted herself
out of the chair. “I hate to do this to you, but you’re a tri-sensor. The
equipment has got to be tested. Besides, I know what Al and Yuri have planned
next week, and I can’t let that happen.”

This time, my brain processed the
situation instantly, and I yelled, “Alllllfonsooooo!”

Only I didn’t. My mouth failed to
open. My limbs remained inert. All I could do was stare in growing horror at
Lou as she patted my cheek like she really did feel bad for me.

“Al!” I managed to croak, but it
came out more like, “Ow.”

“You’re not hurt, Cleo, don’t
freak out. It’s Clint.” Rachel, a cheerful blonde nowhere near as dippy as her
mom, unfolded a chair beside Herman’s contraption. She and Clint settled me
into it, with Clint careful to keep a hand on my skin. Despite ordering my fists
to punch and my feet to kick like the cows who were not in this barn, I
couldn’t rouse myself to struggle.

Samantha pushed moods, but apparently
Clint could push torpor. Luckily, my brain remained active enough to gibber
with fear.

Once I was settled in the chair, Clint
stood behind me and wrapped his fingers around my head, which intensified the
whole gibbering with fear part.

“Did somebody turn the blanket
on?” Clint asked. “We don’t want any ears noticing the noise and coming to
investigate.”

“It’s been on.” Herman, also in a
lawn chair, inserted a compact disk into a slot in his machine. “Do you think
I’ve never done this before, boy?”

Clint grunted. “No need to be
touchy, old man, you don’t usually work in the field.”

“Or a frigging barn loft, but
here I am. If I pop my new hip out of joint, Lou, you’re paying to fix it.”

“Herman, I keep telling you,
there are people everywhere, and I don’t want any children harmed. The
tri-sensor frequency might affect others. Not even I could erase how suspicious
that would be.” Lou scooched her chair through the straw until she could hold
my hand. “This may hurt, cookie, but I’ll erase the pain when I erase your
memories of how this happened.”

“Whuh?” I said, since, “Lou, I
can’t believe you’re the saboteur when you’ve been ranting about supras who
sneak around and do bad things!” was too long a sentence for me to spit out. So
was, “Why the hell are you doing this when you’re such a nice, nosey, obsessive
about the supra police kind of lady and I thought we were friends.”

My friend—my friend!—placed her
other hand atop mine. Her large fingers were soft and gentle, at odds with
whatever was about to happen to me. Her fingernails had been daubed with little
daisies. “I know you have questions, Cleo, but why bother answering them when
I’m going to erase it? Suffice to say you’re a vital part of revolutionizing
how supra criminals are going to be handled. If those old bastards want to wear
twentieth century blinders, if they don’t have the balls to establish a police force,
it’s up to concerned citizens to protect the world from evil.”

What kind of evil, and where did
Lou draw the line? Litterbug evil? Cheating on your taxes evil? Using your
suprasense to make your life easier evil? Or evil like saboteurs who go around
blasting everyone with...whatever that machine was going to blast me with?

This could burn me out. Put me in
a coma. Kill me.

And it seemed I couldn’t do a
damn thing about it.

“I wish we didn’t have to burn
Cleo,” Rachel said. “Mom likes her. She’s been so good for Beau, Mom says he’s
almost friendly now.”

“It’s probably because we took
his abilities away,” Lou said.

“You know, I got the impression
he was better,” Rachel mused. “Wasn’t his burn supposed to be permanent? Herman
must have given me the wrong frequency.”

“You screwed it up yourself,” the
old man snapped at her. “Wrong setting, I bet. You were supposed to get Cleo.”
My friend. The note.
It should have been you.

“I am telling you, it wasn’t
working on Cleo.”

“I knew we should have sent the
twins,” Herman said.

“The wonder twins were otherwise
occupied,” Rachel said. “Everything would have been fine if Beau hadn’t spotted
me when that puppy dog was going nuts and Cleo kept hearing the machine. Your
levels for hearing sensitives still suck. I had to improvise.”

Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
Everything was starting to add up, and I wasn’t even good at math.

Beau had been hit in Atlanta.
Rachel had apparently done the deed. While we were at Wyse, we’d all had
headaches, and I’d kept hearing a malfunctioning computer outside the
conference room. Beau had recognized someone right before he came down with a
bad case of the burns. Rachel was a chameleon, obviously better than YuriCorp
realized if she could go invisible like Beau. Or avoid John’s nose. Or conceal
Clint’s and my departure from the picnic.

Rachel stuck a hand on her hip.
With her pink T-shirt, she wore khaki shorts and a bouncy ponytail. She looked
like a cheerleader, not a terrorist saboteur. “There’s something weird about
what Beau can do. I’ve thought so ever since he trained me.”

“That little stinker has a
secret.” Lou clucked her tongue. “It was really hard to erase Atlanta out of
his head. We’ll have to look into that.”

Beau had secrets, plural. Lou
thought he’d forgotten Atlanta, but he’d asked Clint about Rachel at the
dunking booth. Lied about having seen her lately. Why would he do that—because
he wanted to make idle conversation?

Hardly. If he’d connected her to
the sabotage and to Clint, there was hope for me, wasn’t there? The question
was, would Beau bother to do anything about it?

Clint cleared his throat. “We
should take out Psytech’s tri-sensor. We aren’t sure what he can do, and Cleo
hasn’t hurt anybody.”

“But she could,” Lou pointed out.
“Sees lies, knows everything. I can’t always be there to erase her when
somebody slips up. She’s a problem. This is the solution.”

“Nah,” I mumbled. I was dumb
enough to walk right into this trap. Dumb enough, evidently, to have been
erased by Lou on more than one occasion. How dangerous could I be?

“Sammie likes her,” Clint said.
“Sammie and Jolene have a good nose for people.”

“She’s not bad,” Herman agreed,
shocking the hell out of me. “Complains too much, though. Eh, she’ll live.”

Herman wasn’t lying, but I wasn’t
reassured.

Rachel smiled at Clint, her eyes
slightly protruding like many of the Lampeys. “Samantha’s judgment about you is
way off. She’s not that great a judge of character. Yet you’re still protecting
her.”

“Don’t go there,” Clint warned,
his fingers on my head twitching.

Despite the fact I’d normally be
curious enough to pry, I didn’t want her to go there, either. It was my
important body part between Clint’s throttling fingers.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Lou
said. “We haven’t softened up Psytech’s schedulers enough to trace individual
employees. It took forever to get somebody we could trust in there. That place
is riddled with corruption and misdeeds. I almost want to bring them down, but
it’s not our place. We’re only here to protect the innocent.”

My abilities were not reduced by
the Clint effect, because Lou masked so deeply when she claimed pure intentions
that I knew she, for one, wasn’t so pure.

She had every intention of
destroying anyone who stood in her way of being judge, jury—executioner.

And I’d never suspected.

We locked gazes. She smiled at
me. Her slightly crooked front teeth gleamed in the light from the naked
overhead bulb. If she knew what I could do, did she know what I’d just seen in
the patina of her lies?

“Herman, are we ready?” she
asked.

“Not much longer. I’m uploading
the settings I tested on her this week. She can still hear the lower registers,
but who cares? They’ll work. Now everyone shut up or I won’t be able to tell if
somebody’s coming.”

“The twins will take care of
intruders.” Lou did not have crazy eyes. Weren’t villains supposed to have
crazy eyes? Like Clint? Like Alex? She looked like the same Lou who’d shared
casseroles with me, who’d gossiped with me, who’d taken me under her
domineering wing.

Had I solved this stupid case the
first time I’d asked her about it only to have my knowledge wiped? How could I,
how could Yuri and Al, never have wondered if our on-staff eraser was erasing
her tracks?

She had fooled us all.

“We shouldn’t be doing this
anywhere near hearing sensitives,” Clint said. “Even ones like Cleo sometimes
notice the machine. This is risky.”

“We’re creating too much of a
pattern.” Lou sounded like she was tired of her flunkies’ grievances. “We have
to perfect the device so we can move forward.”

“Psytech’s tri-sensor is here. We
don’t often have access to him.” Clint’s voice was detached but his thumbs
rubbed my skull. “I’d be happy to trade Cleo for him. I’d be happy to burn him
in his house.”

“You’d be happy to burn down his
house,” Rachel said.

“Not this again.” Lou heaved a
deep sigh. “The hits have to look like corporate infighting. It keeps them
suspicious of each other and off our backs. It’s one thing to go to somebody’s
house selling magazines. After I get through with them, they don’t remember
anything but the fundraiser. It would be another if we hit them in their
personal spaces. That would escalate things in a way that would interfere with
what we’re trying to achieve.”

Clint’s fingers tightened on my
scalp again. “Today is hardly going to look like corporate infighting.”

Rachel removed an amber pill
bottle from her pocket and shook it. “That’s why we have amp.”

“Cleo doesn’t do drugs,” Clint
said. “You’re the one who amps.”

“Like you never touch it.” Rachel
grinned again. That much smiling during a situation like this had to be screwy.
She was another with crazy eyes. Crazy amp eyes. In addition to the effect amp
could have on supra abilities, I’d been told it behaved like a mild dose of
ecstasy. “Everyone knows how stressed Cleo’s been. Aunt Lou did a fantastic job
singling her out. On top of that, Yuri and Al and the rest realize how much she
doesn’t want to do those interviews. They’ll hardly be surprised when she
panics into an amp-fueled burnout.”

Rachel snapped on a pair of
rubber gloves as she talked. I thrashed with all my might. This amounted to my
head flumping sideways, giving me a view of the machine. It had several dials,
a screen in the middle, speakers on either side, and no probes or scanners. No
spooky trays with surgical knives or needles. Why did she need medical gloves?

Clint righted my head before I
could inspect the gizmo further.

“I see everyone’s point,” Lou
announced to her flunkies. There was no doubt in my mind, after seeing Lou in
action this week, hell, for the past several months, she was in charge of the
whole operation. I had no idea how many people were involved besides the four
in the loft plus the twins, but it didn’t matter. She was the boss of them all.

And then she lied. “Since Cleo’s
a fan favorite, we’ll compromise.”

“Luh,” I moaned and flopped my
head to the side again. I still had my ability. So far.

Lou and Herman exchanged a
glance. “We won’t make this permanent. She might not have a stroke. Right,
Herman?” Lou said. “Use the express setting. It’s noisier but we’re short on time.”

“You’re the boss.” Herman rotated
a dial all the way to the right. A small screen displayed what looked like
sound waves, but I heard nothing. Was it already happening? No one who knew me
would believe I’d popped amp, but amp in my system might distract them from
thinking it was the standard sabotage. And it wasn’t like I’d remember anything
to tell them.

 “We’ve got thirty minutes before
the next hayride, and they need to find Cleo in the maze,” Lou told Rachel.
“Amp her up, sugar.”

“Nnn!” I protested. How did they
think they were going to get away with this?

Because they’d gotten away with
the rest of it, despite the fact the opposing team had a ringer. A ringer whose
talent, whose way of life, was about to be permanently neutralized.

While I obviously didn’t want a
stroke, for the first time in my life, I also didn’t want to lose my ability.
Why me? I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not to them, anyway. There were better
guinea pigs out there, like the trisensor at Psytech I was willing to bet my
cats was Alex Berkley.