Closed Hearts (3 page)

The perfect rook.
For a couple hours, I could pretend I wasn’t the girl who jackers hated and readers feared.

The customers’ mind-scents blended with the smell of burgers and onions steaming up from the short-order cook’s station. I stepped past his assistant chopping vegetables under a forest of dangling silver pots and dodged another assistant as he cycled through the mindware interfaces on the flash ovens. I grabbed a short apron from the employee closet at the far end of the kitchen and tapped the nameplate until it brought up
Lucy
. Maintaining the lie here was important, and not just for me. Mrs. Weissmann had her own peculiar ideas about jackers: she knew I was rooking, and she still let me work for her. But her customers would flee if they knew a jacker waitressed at the Dutch Apple.

I checked the mirror on the employee closet door and smoothed a hand over my gelled flat hair, dyed black now with nano-color and trimmed short. The sleek hairstyle and the synth-tattoo that snaked up my throat and cheek pegged me for an asynchroner—a rebel who thought it was somehow mesh to listen to music without a melody. Asynchroners could rail against the tyranny of synchronous thought all they liked, but I knew that being “out of sync” with the world was anything but mesh. However, the twisted black vine and blue thorns on my cheek made for excellent camouflage. Too bad it was starting to fade.

Tracey, the waitress on shift, stopped behind me.
Early, aren’t you?
Her mind-scent was as sugary-sweet as her cherry-red lipstick, and her hands were full with the two plates of hamburgers and chips she had just picked up from the cook. My shift didn’t start until six, but it was Friday, which meant better tips, and I didn’t want her to think I was trying to steal hers.

Got off early from my other job.
I glanced at the plates.
I’ll finish up these orders, but you can keep the tips.

She handed over the plates with a bright smile.
Table two. You can take the tips, hon. I know you need them. And you can have table five—they haven’t placed their order yet.

Thanks.
I grinned all the way to table two and delivered the plates, but the couple barely noticed me slide the hamburgers onto their red-and-white-checkered table. A tru-cast had drawn the mental attention of everyone in the diner, dimming the mental chatter as everyone gazed at the screen suspended on the far wall. A tru-caster stood outside the gleaming capitol building in Springfield, her lips unmoving but her thought waves captured by the boom-mic and translated into words scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

A vote by legislators in Springfield today has made Illinois the first state to recognize the presence of mindjackers among the populace.
The willowy reporter brushed back the hair that had blown across her face.
Politicians in several states are likewise considering legal classification for people exhibiting these mutant powers, a move seen by many as a step to pressure Washington into action against the growing threat they pose. Senator Vellus promises to introduce such legislation soon in the U.S. Senate.

A picture of Senator Vellus, Illinois’s most outspoken anti-jacker politician, flashed on the screen, and I gritted my teeth against the murmur of approval that swept through the minds of the diner’s occupants, including Tracey. If she knew who I really was, she certainly wouldn’t be sharing tips with me. Whispers of fear, loathing and outright hatred wafted through the diner like a bad smell.

The tru-cast camera panned to a group of protesters carrying placards and pumping their fists in the air. They were synchronizing their thoughts, trying to amplify the volume, a favorite technique used to disrupt businesses that the anti-jacker groups suspected were employing jackers. It made for great tru-casting, if you liked helping them augment their hateful message by casting it around the country. Their chant must have reached the boom-mic, because fragments scrolled along the bottom of the screen.

Lock them
…
stop
…
do it now
…

The tru-caster’s thoughts cut in.
It would appear that the vote today has much support throughout the community of citizens who have traveled to the capitol to express their concerns.

Concerned citizens.
Right.
Maria, the tru-cast reporter who helped me expose the government experiments on jacker changelings, would never have pretended this kind of hate was news.

Mrs. Weissmann strolled into the dining room, obviously alerted by the change in mental volume, even from the back office.

Wass is los?
She scanned the diner with her hands on her hips, shorter than me but with twice the presence. Thoughts weren’t really a language, just waves of energy that beamed from people’s heads, but Mrs. Weissmann’s thoughts always came out flavored Pennsylvania Dutch, like her apple pies.
Do I serve such schleck that you must watch this trash?

People shifted in their seats, unease spreading through the diner on murmured thoughts. No one wanted her feistiness directed at them. They all liked the pie enough to want to keep coming back.

Mrs. Weissmann threw up her hands and stalked toward the screen.
These narrow-minded imbeciles do not know their bottoms from a hole in the ground. They are the ones that should be locked up!
With a sharp mental command
make the screen off!
the tru-cast went black. Mental conversations bubbled up again, but were subdued.

I had to fight back a smile, but it died when two couples in the far corner got up to leave. They were afraid that Mrs. Weissmann was a jacker sympathizer. Their fear left a bitter taste in my mouth even after they scurried out the door.

Mrs. Weissmann walked between the chrome-and-red tables, distracting her patrons with discussions of pie and trying to mute their fears. The world was running more and more scared from jackers every day, and Mrs. Weissmann was already paying a price for her tolerance. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to find out that she had a jacker working for her. It would kill her business, and I didn’t want any more ruined lives on my hands.

I’d had enough of that already.

To my relief, Mrs. Weissmann worked her magic, and the mental chatter slowly turned friendly in her wake. A trio of teenage boys with fashionably sweeping hair teased her about the excess of chili sauce she put in the omelets.

If you don’t like it, you take your business elsewhere!
The boys’ mental laughter warmed the tables around them.

I forced my shoulders to relax and shuffled to table five. The couple’s discussion centered on how Mrs. Weissmann should be careful with her thoughts. When I reached their table, I forced myself to link a neutral question to them.

Can I take your order?

They ignored me.
Doesn’t she know she could be targeted?

All it would take is someone thinking that she was a sympathizer—

Yes, yes, and then what? She’s not so young and spritely anymore.
The couple’s thoughts slid fast and furious over each other.

I think she lives alone. Does she live alone?
The man ran his hand through his short-cropped silver hair and the woman shifted in her vinyl-covered seat, twisting her gnarled hands.
Do you think she knows any jackers? Maybe she doesn’t.

How would I know?

But if she does, the jackers could turn on her—they might even come to the diner! I’ve heard jackers kidnap readers, and whole families end up as slaves. You know they can jack into your pet’s mind and turn them against you—

I leaned across them to scoop up the tip left by the previous customers and to interrupt their thoughts. The rumors that flew through readers’ minds about jackers kept getting wilder and wilder: it was like the world had gone demens, all ten billion souls feeding off the paranoia of each other.

I tucked the tip in my pocket, making a mental note to give it to Tracey before her shift was done.
Can I take your order, please?

The couple simultaneously gave me their orders. Eight months ago, sorting the barrage of their thoughts would have made my head hurt. Now, I quickly scribed their meals on my pad and cast it to the kitchen without thinking. I tucked the pad in the pocket of my apron and scurried to get their drinks.

They resumed their argument as soon as I turned my back.

I had filled two glasses with ice and started to pour their tea when the front door dinged, announcing a new customer. I glanced up, hoping they might take a table in my half of the diner, but I froze when I saw who it was.

Raf.

Familiar dark curls and trim soccer physique. My smile was automatic, and my heart missed a beat, the way it did every time I saw him, but between that skipped beat and the next, I saw who was behind him.

His parents!

Raf blocked the doorway, his hands reaching for the doorframe, and his dark brown eyes went wide. His parents bumped into him from behind, and Raf’s broad shoulders hopefully prevented them from seeing me.

What was he doing here? And why had he brought his parents? He knew I worked at the Dutch Apple! Raf peeled his gaze away from me and turned back to his mom, apologizing to the diminutive Mama Santos for nearly knocking her off her three-inch heels. He was buying me a second of time. I set down the cold glasses of tea, now slippery with condensation, and fled for the kitchen.

I just prayed I could get out before Raf’s parents gave me away as a jacker.

I wove through the kitchen of the Dutch Apple, dodging the short-order cook and linking a thought to Tracey.
Tables are all yours. Order’s up on table five.
Mrs. Weissmann had returned to her office, working on her recordkeeping.
Taking a break, Mrs. Weissmann,
I linked as I rushed past.

A break! Of course. Why do you bother to come?
But her thoughts held no malice.

I linked back to check on Raf and his parents, to see if my cover had been blown. Raf was humming one of his awful synchrony band songs, “It’s Not Like You,” to mask his worried thoughts that he had given me away.

Don’t stand in the doorway!
his father thought.

What is wrong with you, Raf?
Mama Santos thought.
Stop that humming! It’s not polite.

I shoved open the back door of the diner and fled for the relative safety of the parking lot. I kept going along the back of the building, across the crumbled pavement, and didn’t stop until I was next to a dumpster that reeked of yesterday’s rotting vegetables—out of Raf’s mindreading range, and more importantly, his parents’. Of course I could still hear their thoughts.

There’s plenty of room here!
Mama Santos thought.
And you were worried it might be full.

Lucky for us,
Raf thought.
I know you wanted to try the pie.
With me out of the room, it was easier for Raf to pretend that I had never been there, which made the tension in my body step down. Mama Santos and Raf’s dad busied themselves with picking out a table.

Convinced that I’d escaped unnoticed, I pulled back from their minds. I wanted to ask Raf what he was thinking, showing up in the middle of the Dutch Apple and especially bringing his parents! He knew I had a shift tonight. It was risky for me, risky for Mrs. Weissmann. Even risky for him if his parents found out he was still seeing me. I could have linked that thought to his head, but then his careful attempts not to think about me would have been scuttled.

The official story was that Raf and I weren’t seeing each other anymore, after my family changed names and left Gurnee. Which made his parents happy—they were convinced that I had been jacking him all along, because otherwise why would he want a girl like me? When I was a non-mindreading zero, they didn’t mind, but now that I was a mindjacker, they wanted Raf to have nothing to do with me. It didn’t help that I had been wearing Mama Santos’s frilly red blouse when I had rescued the jacker changelings on a national tru-cast.

Even my family didn’t know about me and Raf. Well, I had told Xander, because I needed him to cover for me when I snuck out of the house to meet Raf, which didn’t happen often, only every other week or so, between my work and his soccer practice. Mostly, we spent our time sending furtive scrits, but if he wanted to see me, we could have arranged it. He certainly didn’t need to risk coming to the Dutch Apple.

Raf and his parents would probably stay for a while. Maybe I should hail an autocab and go home. As I tried to figure out what to do next, the back door opened, and Raf stepped into the afternoon sun, shading his eyes. I hesitated to link any thoughts into his head—he was still in thought range of the rest of the diner.

When he saw me, he beamed the irresistible grin that I loved, but I waited while he sprinted across the pavement with soft soccer footfalls. When I was sure he was out of range of the diner, but before he reached me, I linked a thought to him.