Closed Hearts (31 page)

The mindguard stationed by the shield blandly waved us toward the weapons detector. Julian nearly stepped on my shoes, he was following so close. Just as we were about to cross the threshold of the weapons detector, Vellus’s bulky mindguard emerged from the elevators. I stopped and Julian bumped into me. The mindguard reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun. And not a dart gun. The kind with bullets that killed people.

My breath caught, and Julian moved behind me, no doubt taking out my dad’s gun as well. About fifteen feet of air separated us from guard, but it was only three feet to the shield. As long as we were on this side, we couldn’t jack him, but he could certainly shoot us. If we lunged across the shield, Julian might be able to handle him into lowering his weapon. Or we might both get shot.

Julian leaned into me, like he wanted to go for the lunging option, which only flashed up an image in my mind of Simon, lying bleeding in the desert with a bullet hole in him.

I turned to face Julian, sandwiching the gun between us. “Julian, don’t! Getting shot won’t help things.”

He gripped the dart gun tighter. It was a fast-acting dart gun, but it wasn’t that fast. He spoke through clenched teeth. “I don’t like your odds going in there without me.”

The mindguard watched us carefully, gun leveled at my back, but not moving any closer.

“If they wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead,” I said. “He would have shot us as soon as he stepped out of the elevator.”

“Shooting us
here
would cause some difficulties.” Julian kept glaring at the guard. “It’s what they’ll do once you’re in Vellus’s office that I’m concerned about.”

“If I don’t come out in twenty minutes,” I said, “you can come get me.”

Julian peeled his gaze from the mindguard and peered down at me. I was suddenly aware of how close we were standing.

“Am I going to have to rescue you again?” Julian asked.

“Possibly,” I said. “Just don’t kiss me this time.”

His shoulders relaxed, very slightly.

I turned and stepped through the weapons detector, my hair lifting up at the back of my neck as I passed through the shield.

Vellus’s overmuscled mindguard backed toward the brass-trimmed elevators, keeping his eyes on Julian. Now that I had passed through the shield, I was tempted to brush the mindguard’s brain to peer into his thoughts, but with his gun still trained on Julian, I didn’t want to take any chances.

I slipped into the elevator, and the guard holstered his weapon once we were both inside. The elevator ride was short, then Mr. Muscle guided me to a room with red velvet carpet and paintings older than my great-grandma. A portrait of Vellus hung above his receptionist’s desk, his chiseled features gleaming with holo-paint that made his face seem to move. The receptionist wrangled the mindware interface on her computer, and Mr. Muscle and I both linked into her mind and reflected her innocuous thoughts as if we were readers. Which made me look up the full height of the guard to his strong-jawed face. Did the receptionist not
know
he was a jacker?

Please have a seat,
thought the receptionist without looking.
I’ll let the Senator know you’re here.
I ignored the two ornately carved wooden chairs that lined the wall—I needed to be on my feet, ready for whatever Vellus had in store for me. I reached toward Vellus’s office, but it was blocked by a disruptor shield.

Why was Vellus keeping me waiting? Maybe he wanted to make me nervous, although holding my dad captive and sending the armed guard seemed sufficient for that. Still, I didn’t want to appear anxious, so I clasped my hands behind my back and pretended to size up Mr. Muscle like the side of beef he resembled. He could crush me physically, and probably mentally as well, if only he could get into my head. I smiled jauntily up at him, just to put him off balance. Amazingly, it worked. His face twitched, then he became fascinated by the paintings on the wall. For some reason I couldn’t understand, I unnerved him.

The receptionist finally looked up from her work, and her nails tapped the desk as she rose.

Would you like to have a seat while you wait?
she thought.

I turned to face her with a polite smile.
No thanks.

Her sensible shoes whispered across the lush carpet, and she came to stand too close to me. Her wiry frame was short, probably no more than five foot, and she inspected me through her trufocus glasses, which adjusted as she leaned closer to peer at my face.

A smile snaked up her lips. “You’ve changed your hair.” She cleared her throat, smoothing the roughness from not speaking aloud for so long. A chill creeped into my stomach as I realized she knew exactly who I was. “And I don’t remember those tattoos from before,” she continued. “Are they new?” The contradiction between her fake-polite spoken words and the fervently anti-jacker thoughts roiling beneath jarred me out of her head. Her glasses sparkled reflections from the plasma lights, but the menace in her eyes shone through. I could have taken her in a fist fight, or I could have jacked her, but instead I shrank away.

I’d never seen someone look at me like they wished I didn’t exist.

“I watched all the tru-casts, you know.” I pictured her glued to the screens, soaking up all the rhetoric that Vellus spewed. “You and those other snively jacker kids who acted frightened, as if they wouldn’t like to kill us all in our sleep.”

She was talking about the changelings I had rescued. The ones Kestrel had tortured with his experiments. The ones who were barefoot and hollow cheeked on the tru-casts, held at gunpoint by jacker FBI agents. Her caricature of them was so awful, so ugly and wrong, that I couldn’t even muster anger or outrage. It just left me speechless.

“That’s right,” she said. “Don’t bother to deny it. I see right through that pretty little face of yours to what’s inside. How many readers have you killed, Kira Moore? Or do you just control them to do whatever nasty things you jackers do for fun? How many children have to grow up in fear of monsters like you lurking in our schools and our offices and our neighborhoods before people realize what you are and put a stop to it?”

I wanted to protest. I wanted to lash out at her. But words completely failed me in the face of this volcano of hatred from this tiny person.

There was nothing I could say that would make any difference.

I didn’t know I was leaning away from her until I bumped into Mr. Muscle. His face was expressionless. He certainly wasn’t coming to the defense of jackers. I guessed he had already sold his soul if he was working for Vellus.

Just like my dad.

I took a couple steps back, my heart shrinking with that thought, when the door to Vellus’s office swung open and banged against the wall. My dad stalked toward me, trailed by Vellus and another oversized mindguard. My dad looked ready to punch Vellus in the face, which halfway thrilled me. I wanted my dad to hit Vellus so badly it made my fists curl up. Whatever was up, I was ready to run or jack or possibly deck Vellus myself.

I reached for Vellus’s mind, only to be swatted away by the mindguard closest to him and slammed back into my own head. He was so strong I couldn’t even reach out to my dad. Vellus’s personal mindguard was taller and not as bulked up as Mr. Muscle, but he was an incredibly strong jacker, almost like Myrtle. I searched my dad’s reddened face for a clue about what had happened.

“So nice of you to join us, Kira.” Vellus directed his words to me, but they stopped my dad in his tracks. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.” He sounded pleasantly surprised to see me, as if he weren’t holding my dad hostage to get me up here. His secretary had retreated to her desk, but the heat of her smirk scorched me from across the room.

“I was planning on paying you a visit, sooner or later, and here you are, doing me the courtesy of coming to my office. It’s nice to see you under less, shall we say, tense circumstances.”

The room was feeling plenty tense to me. My dad reached my side, placing his body between me and Mr. Muscle.

“But I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.” Vellus waved away the idea that I had jacked him in the tru-cast station. “As your father was explaining, it would appear that I have something you want, which is tremendously fortunate for me, as you have something I want as well.”

“What do you want?”

Vellus grinned that sim-cast-ready smile. I didn’t know what game we were playing, but it felt like I had already lost.

“I would like nothing more than to release Mr. Molloy to you, so that you can find your mindreader friend and return to the suburbs. I hear they serve a very fine pie at the Dutch Apple, although I’ve never tried it myself. I may have to remedy that sometime soon.”

The idea of Vellus coming to the Dutch Apple sent a cold trickle down my back, and I was sure releasing Molloy came with a price tag. My dad tensed, edging a little closer. I wanted desperately to link into his mind, but Vellus’s personal mindguard and Mr. Muscle had lined me up between them, keeping me squarely in my own head. They didn’t press or try to get inside, but it felt like being smothered in a mental blanket.

“What do you want from me?” I repeated.

“It’s a small thing, actually, only a short bit of your time,” Vellus said with a smile. “I want you to tell the truth. You like to do that, don’t you?” His grin grew more evil with each tooth exposed. “I think we have more in common than it might appear, Kira. You wish to have your mindreading friend back, safe and sound, and you want to return home to your family and friends in the suburbs. I want to reassure mindreaders that their lives are going to be safe and secure too. I’m sure we can come to an agreement where we both get the things we want.”

Anger still mottled my dad’s face, but it was blank, with no clue as to what Vellus wanted, and minutes were ticking by while Vellus beat around the bush. I needed to talk our way out of this before Julian came charging up after us.

“What
exactly
will it take to get you to release Molloy?” I asked.

Vellus smirked. “I’d like you to do a tru-cast interview. Another one, although decidedly different from your first appearance on the national airwaves.”

“An interview?” Maybe Vellus was demens after all.

“You can explain how dangerous jackers are and how much you regret all the harm and chaos caused by the mutant jackers living in our midst.”

“I… I don’t understand.” People already thought jackers were dangerous, and haters like Vellus’s secretary made up awful stories about jackers all by themselves. They didn’t need my help. How would anything I said on a tru-cast make any difference?

“I want you to detail the grievous things that jackers in our own city have done,” Vellus said. “Just tell the truth, Kira. That’s all I want from the girl who is the face of the jackers.”

Then it hit me: Vellus wanted me to talk about Jackertown. The crews and the contractors and the jackworkers. My thoughts flashed to Julian. And Ava and Myrtle and the changelings. Even Sasha and Hinckley. The looks on their faces when they saw me on a tru-cast with Vellus, talking about how the jackers in Jackertown were dangerous… and should be locked up in his Detention Center.

My mouth wouldn’t work at first, then I finally blurted, “I can’t do that!”

“Of course you can, Kira,” he said calmly. “I’m not asking that much of you, and I’m giving you so much in return. A chance to get your friend back from a brute like Mr. Molloy. That would make a brilliant story, don’t you think?” He trailed his hand across the air like a scrolling tru-cast headline. “Mindreader kidnapped by evil mindjacker! I would simply be the loyal public servant who helped you bring home your friend. So, you see, we truly
do
want the same things.”

Blood pounded in my ears, and my dad’s hand settled at the small of my back. Maybe he expected to find the gun there? His face didn’t show disappointment, just high-voltage tension. He gave me an encouraging nod. He wanted me to tell Vellus yes. My chest hollowed out.

“No…” The words were a whisper to my dad, but Vellus took it as my answer.

He inclined his head to the side. “You haven’t already settled in with those ragged types that rattle around Jackertown, have you?” His eyes took on a darker, sharper gleam. “Your friend in the lobby won’t have much of a chance against the police, even with his jacking talents, if I’m forced to sound an alarm. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

I swallowed. “No,” I said, louder this time.

Vellus sighed and looked like he was trying to be patient. “Kira, you may think that you and your little friends are stronger, more superior, but you’re not. It’s only a matter of time before readers find a way to keep jackers completely contained.” He swept his hand back toward his shield-protected office. “With technology. With state-of-the art prisons to keep you safely quarantined. And with the knowledge that you are very, very different from them.”

My face burned. “Different isn’t a crime, you know.”

“No,” Vellus said. “Not yet. But I expect that will change, and soon. Society can’t tolerate people like you in their midst, Kira. They fear you. And society has always destroyed what it fears. It’s jackers or readers, Kira, and in the end, the readers will have to win.”