The clueless eyewitness didn’t care much for that, either, but gave it up with a disgruntled exhalation. I laid the keys down on the bed and peeled off my glove, letting my tattoo show. “I picked pockets before I was a psychic. It’s like riding a bicycle. Larcenous fingers never forget. And I faked years of psychic shit before I gave in and started using the real deal. You don’t have to have special talents to steal from or manipulate people to get things done. You only need flexible morals and an extra-small in off-the-rack consciences.”
“You didn’t use your psychic ability when you worked the carnival as a teenager?” When I shook my head, Hector asked in the simple confusion any normal person would use, “Why?”
“Because it’s not fun.” I hovered my hand over the keys. “It’s never fun.” It sucked is what it did. It sucked long and hard, but I muscled through because it was how I made my money and it was who I was. I hadn’t wanted to believe that for a long time, but in the end … it was me.
I closed my hand around the keys and felt the flood.
I didn’t
let
it through. I had no choice. I touched, and it came, sure as death and taxes. I knew one
much better than the other, but that’s why God made accountants.
I tightened my fist around the metal as wave after wave crashed over me. I could feel my body temperature dropping like a rock.
Great.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
I’d mentally called Thackery a sociopath more than once, but I hadn’t meant it. True sociopaths are rare. Assholes are common. I’d thought Thackery was more likely the second. I was wrong.
Stepping into the mind of a true sociopath was like locking yourself in a walk-in freezer, alone. All the warmth was immediately drained out of you. There was no physical reason it should happen—sociopaths weren’t walking Popsicles—but it happened just the same. And then there was the aloneness. There was no one else in the world but you. No one in the room, no one in the building, no one in the state … the country … across the ocean. Not a single speck of life anywhere, not even bacteria. You might as well be on the surface of the moon.
That
was
being a sociopath. The sole creature in their universe. People, animals—they weren’t the same as you. They weren’t alive. They didn’t have meaning beyond that of game pieces on a board. Usually less meaning than that, more like stupid, clunky furniture you had to rearrange to get a certain result. Boring, all that manipulation. So damn boring. Sometimes the result could be entertaining,
depending on how you were hardwired. Some sociopaths killed, and some didn’t. It wasn’t that the ones who didn’t kill had a problem with it—other than risk. Manipulation was boring, but prison was even more so.
Thackery was smart. Little Julian hadn’t cut up Fluffy and Fido behind the shed. No, little Julian went to an advanced school and took many perfectly reputable biology and anatomy classes where you obtained your own cat for dissection from the local shelter.
Teenage Julian hadn’t strangled coeds at his college. He paid hookers, who took a little extra money for a lot of extra abuse.
Grown-up Julian hadn’t killed his widowed father for a hefty inheritance. He simply hadn’t reminded the forgetful man to take his heart medicine and made a bet with himself how many months it would take.
And Dr. Thackery hadn’t killed Charlie …
I hadn’t killed Charles Allgood, because I’d known there was a spy in the program who would do it for me. I’d seen subtle alien fingerprints in the computer codes. Witnessed the tiniest of glitches barely perceptible to me, much less the peons around me, and I told no one. I thought, “What would I do as a spy out to sabotage and steal a program?” and I’d been correct. Disrupt the equipment and kill the test subject. Now I was calculating that I was smart enough to identify the spy in time to fix blame, save the program, and become Charles’s successor.
There was the remaining Allgood to think about—and then the unbelievably improbable discovery of a real psychic. Someone who could find the spy before I did and snatch the spoils. I had to rethink my lifetime rule of doing the one thing that could potentially destroy my life. And it came down to the question: did the risk outweigh the benefit? I hadn’t been certain.
But then, as they most often did for me, things began to fall into place. I hadn’t targeted the spy yet, but the spy had targeted the worst problem for both of us.
Jackson Lee Eye.
And if I was very fortunate, Allgood, in a doomed attempt to save a scientifically perverse life, would be disposed of as well. Because that was Dr. Hector Allgood down to his DNA.
A “good man.”
A Boy Scout.
An idiot.
“Jackson, you’re turning blue, for Christ’s sake. Are you all right?”
I dropped the keys and gazed blankly at an unfamiliar hand, bloodless and white, with blue, cold-pinched fingers. Allgood was calling me by that troublemaker’s name. It was insulting, demeaning, debasing. I wasn’t a mutant. I was genetically perfect.
“Shut up,”
I ground out, fighting a tense jaw and numb lips.
“And do
not
call me that.”
“Damn it. I can do nothing but fuck up with this shit. It’s a wonder Charlie lived as long as he did with my ass around.”
A hand circled my arm.
“We
need to go to the infirmary. It’s where we should’ve done this to begin with.”
I looked away from my hand to my legs. Wrong clothes. Wrong body. What had happened? I didn’t panic. People like me did not panic. We took advantage of every situation. We were the puppet masters, controlling every movement of the deaf, dumb, and blind wood under our fingertips. We …
We …
My brain wrenched, and the colors in the room changed. No one saw colors exactly the same as the next person. No one saw the world the same as the next person. I inhaled air that felt almost searing to frozen lungs; pushed Thackery, his memories, and his thoughts to the side; and came home.
“It’s okay.” I resisted Hector’s grip, grateful for the thousandth time in my life that I wore nothing but long sleeves. I wasn’t ready for another reading yet, especially an accidental one. And I didn’t want to spend any more time in the infirmary. I was there so often now it may as well have been a Starbucks. “I kicked Thackery’s ass to the mental curb. I’m me again.”
“What happened? That can’t be how every reading goes for you. You wouldn’t survive it.” Hector was unconvinced about my claims to health, mental and otherwise, because he pulled the blanket off the top bunk and dumped it in my lap. “And wrap up. You look like a guy on an Arctic expedition who forgot his igloo key. Hell, I can even see your breath.”
I put my glove back on a chilled and shaking hand before cocooning myself. “Goddamn sociopaths. It happens every time. Lucky I don’t run into more than one or two every couple of years. And no, ninety-nine point nine percent of my readings don’t go like that. Thackery has an extremely strong personality and mind. Both are highly fucked up, yeah, but they’re strong.” Getting rid of Thackery’s keys had been more help than the blanket, but between the two, I did begin to warm up.
“Sociopath?” he said sharply. “He did kill Charlie, then?”
“No. Not exactly, but he let it happen. I guess it depends on how good your lawyer is as to whether that’s murder or not.” In my book, it was. He didn’t have absolute concrete knowledge that Charlie would die, but he had a good idea and hope in that black vacuum where a soul should’ve been. I used to play fast and loose with most of the moral code, but when it came to murder, no one was more black-and-white than I was. Losing my family in butchery and blood had made certain of that.
“How about we get the hell out of here? Out of this whole place. This is only the second time I’ve been in this room, and I’m already sick of it. It’s a combination of a
Brady Bunch
camp and a maximum-security cell.” I stood and dropped the blanket. The summer heat would do a better job of baking my bones, driving away the lingering cold. “I’ll tell you the whole thing.”
“Considering, that’s not a lot to ask for. There’s a Denny’s a half hour away.”
“Denny’s. You really know how to reward your friendly local psychic.” But it didn’t stop me from quickly reaching for the doorknob at the thought of some temporary freedom.
Hector beat me to it. “Bodyguard, remember?”
“If you think you’re fireproof, go ahead.” There was no smell of gasoline. I still needled him. I enjoyed having someone new to mock. Abby gave as good as she got, and Houdini’s dog brain didn’t quite grasp sarcasm.
Outside, for once, I didn’t complain about the searing sun or the heat. I enjoyed it. It helped chase the rest of Thackery back into that dark walk-in freezer where he belonged. I was bemused to see Hector get down on the red dirt and edge under his car before checking the engine.
“Homemade napalm is one thing. A car bomb is a damn sight more advanced than that.”
“There are many kinds of industrial spies, Eye. Some are as intelligent as the scientists they steal from. It’s not beyond possibility if we have one—”
“You
do,
” I interrupted.
“Right, then they may be smart enough to start in the amateur realm, having us looking for amateur work should their first attempt fail.” He brushed red dust from his pants and shirt. “But I’m smart, too. Charlie always said that the Boy Scouts stole ‘always be prepared’ from me.”
“You boys care for some company?”
We both turned to see Meleah, an uncertain smile on the smooth oval of her face. Hector, for a moment, appeared as uncertain. He’d taken in more than he’d ever planned in the past few days. Where I was learning to trust, he was learning to distrust. A dead brother, backstabbing colleagues, unknown assassins—it would take the faith of any good man.
His eyes flicked to me, the man he’d known for a week, over a woman he’d known for years. Disillusion, whether it came to you as a child or as a grown man, it was a life-changing blow either way. I gave him the barest of nods. Meleah had touched me accidentally. I’d already read her. There was nothing bad there. She was that endless Christmas morning of lights, the curve and gleam of ornaments, the rich taste of eggnog, and the sweet smell of puppy breath from the soft ball of sleeping fur curled up in her lap. I often did my best to wipe my mind of all of my readings, but once in a while, I found a memory worth keeping. This was one of them. And if Hector ever pulled his head out of his ass, he could have Christmases like that for the rest of his life.
“I’m not the safest person to be around right now, but if you like living life on the edge …” I got into the car, leaving the door open. “But you’d better ask Hector. He’s willing to throw himself between me and certain death, but he might not want
you to do the same.” I closed the door and let them sort it out.
• • •
The end result was that Meleah ended up in a booth at Denny’s, tapping her fingers on a greasy menu with a confident smile now replacing her hesitant one. Hector didn’t look happy. It could’ve been from wanting to protect Meleah or dread at hearing how Thackery had played a part in Charlie’s death. Could be both. I didn’t guess. There was nothing I could do about either one. I concentrated on telling the story, resulting in no one looking happy, and making my way through my vegetarian scramble. I didn’t mind eating breakfast twice. I had nothing bad to say about cheese.
“Thackery let Charlie die?” Meleah didn’t touch her food, while I managed bites between words. She was a doctor. She’d seen death before, but there wasn’t a doctor alive who’d seen as much as I had. Everyone I read had known someone who had died, and on average, I read ten people a day. The Black Death could’ve lurked inside my skull by this point. You got used to it, or you went crazy.
I got used to it.
Shrugging again on the subject, I gave her an answer similar to the one I’d given Hector. “He was about eighty percent sure it would happen, so it depends on how you look at it. A normal nonpsycho wouldn’t have automatically thought an industrial spy would rig the machine to kill Charlie. A normal
person would just assume they’d screw up the machine so it didn’t work at all. But Thackery is thinking from the view of a sociopath, and I’d say your spy is a fellow sociopath to do what he did. So Thackery
did
know, better than anyone else would have. To me, it’s murder. To someone else, I don’t know.”
“I know,” Hector said grimly. He hadn’t bothered to order anything to eat. “He saw someone about to push Charlie off a cliff and just let them. He’s a murderer. The trouble is, we have another, more proactive murderer out there and no idea who they are. And they’re brilliant. We never did find out who caused the transplanar to malfunction. We can’t find anything wrong with it—besides that it killed my brother—not in the programming and nothing suspicious on the security footage.”
That was odd, but I was a psychic, not an expert in industrial espionage.
I gave them the rest of it: the fact that Thackery was repeating his sociopathic ways with Hector and me. Someone wanted to push us over that same cliff, and he was pleased as hell to let them do it.