Closed Hearts (6 page)

I couldn’t catch my breath, but I managed to twist out of Julian’s grasp and stumble to the couch, bracing myself as I fell onto it. Raf still lay unmoving on the floor, and I reached to him with my mind. He was asleep, like Julian said. Sprawled on the concrete floor with one knee in the air, but asleep, with no jacker presence in his mind. I gave a shuddering sigh of relief.

“Whatever it is you want from me,” I said, trying to calm my ragged breath, “you’re not getting it if you hurt Raf. I swear I’ll make you pay for anything you do to him.”

Julian picked up the tipped-over chair and sat with a wide smile on his face. “Now, that’s the spirit! I knew the girl who stared down the FBI would have some fight in her.” His face grew more serious. “It was never my intention to have your… um,” he said, glancing at Raf’s inert body, “friend involved in this. I only asked Mr. Molloy to bring you here so we could ask for your help.”

“You have a funny way of sending an invitation.”

“Well, I knew you might be hesitant to consider our proposal,” Julian said. “But if you hear me out, see what we’re planning, I’m sure you will want to be involved.”

“I doubt that.”

“I wouldn’t have needed your help at all if my sister hadn’t gone missing,” Julian said. “Anna’s a keeper like you, but she was snatched a few days ago. There have been a lot of disappearances from Jackertown in the last month. I believe that Kestrel is behind them, rounding up new victims. Mr. Molloy here has precisely the information we need to find him.”

I narrowed my eyes at Molloy. “You know what rock Kestrel is hiding under?”

“I managed to escape the new facility where he’s experimenting on jackers,” Molloy said. “No thanks to you, lassie.” His voice could cut glass.

“Are the changelings still there?” I couldn’t help wanting to know. That was the one thing that Molloy and I had in common—our horror at children being locked up with the most dangerous jackers on the planet, not to mention that Kestrel’s experiments left them with damaged brains.

“Aye,” Molloy said with a sigh. “And my brother as well. Kestrel had him all these years, all this time…” He choked up. “I couldn’t bring him with me in the escape.” For a fractional second, I felt sorry for Molloy. Then I erased that thought from my mind. Molloy didn’t deserve my sympathy.

“Which is why,” Julian said, “Mr. Molloy will be helping us get back in, where we can free the jackers being held by Kestrel. This is your chance, keeper.” Julian leaned close, his hands laced together. “To put right a wrong that has been going on too long. One you know very well, I believe.”

Julian’s words tugged at me. It still haunted me, not being able to save the changelings Kestrel had sent to that hellhole in the desert. Maybe if I helped Molloy, I could earn my way out of him wanting to kill me and the members of my family, including Raf. And Julian was right—what Kestrel was doing was hideously wrong and should be stopped. I had tried to do just that, and failed. I managed to rescue a few changelings, but only by exposing the hidden mindjackers of the world and painting a target on my back. My family had been paying the price for that ever since.

No, protecting my family and Raf had to take top priority. Besides, I knew better than to trust Molloy. And Julian was a strange entity—something I had never encountered before. The urge to run from him still sang through my body. For the moment I would play along. But the second we had a chance to run, I was taking Raf and leaving.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

Molloy’s shock device slowly wore off, and my mental strength returned, along with full use of my limbs and eyesight, but I bought time by playing it up like I was still incapacitated. I would need all my strength to get us out of the mages’ lair, and even more to get Raf safely away. Now that Molloy knew where we lived, my family would have to move again. Farther this time. But first I had to get me and Raf out of here.

I hadn’t reached beyond the walls of the converted door factory, but I figured we must be in Jackertown, on the edge of downtown Chicago and probably the worst place on the planet for me. The jackers here were the ones that had been hardest hit by going public. My disguise wouldn’t keep them from recognizing me as the girl responsible for the mess their lives had become. Especially if my Impenetrable Mind made them extra curious.

If it was a bad place for me, it was even worse for a reader like Raf.

Julian sat across from me at a beat-up wooden table. We had moved from the bunk area clustered in the middle of the factory to the common area where they kept Raf. He was sleeping on a nearby couch that looked as broken-down as the hundred-year-old machinery. I made them pick him up off the floor, although Julian seemed baffled about why I cared. Ava fluttered nearby in their makeshift kitchen. The cabinets must not have been mindware-enabled, because she was opening them by hand. They were old, doors dented and scarred with time and a thousand uses. The shiny flash oven appeared newly installed, but the rest of the cabinets, tables, and chairs seemed to be left over from a lunchroom for the original factory workers.

The mages apparently lived here, beds clustered in the middle and outside jacking range of the city beyond the walls. There were a dozen bunks, but I counted only four mages: Ava, Julian, and two men who lingered by the bunks, talking to Molloy. I wasn’t sure if Molloy counted as a mage or not. The group of tables where Julian and I sat was far enough from the bunks that it was out of their jacking range. Not for me, of course, but probably at the limits of what the others could do.

A door beckoned from a nearby corner of the factory. I had no idea if it was locked, but red-tinged light seeped underneath it from outside. It was getting late. I tried to keep my eyes from wandering in the direction of the door. Darkness might help, but then again, the idea of being in Jackertown after dark made me shudder.

I pretended the shudder was a full-blown shiver and pulled the scratchy blanket Julian had given me tighter around my shoulders. He inspected me again, his eyes taking a long time to cover the space between my hands clutching the blanket and my face.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked. Ava placed a cup of tea in front of me and drifted back to the kitchen.

“A little,” I lied. I was an expert liar. I just hoped that it would hold until I could find a way out.

Julian crossed his arms, crinkling the shiny
nove
-fiber shirt that fit him a little too well, like it was custom-made. Between the shirt and his tailored pants, he looked out of place, like he had accidentally wandered into the dingy factory from a corporate boardroom.

“The effects of the butterfly should be wearing off by now.”

“Butterfly?” I asked. “Is that what Molloy zapped me with?”

He nodded. “It’s one of the new anti-jacker technologies the government has been hard at work developing since we became, well, more of a threat.” He held his hand palm up, like I was Exhibit A of the threat jackers posed.

“Then how did Molloy get hold of it?”

Julian pulled a delicate metallic device that looked like an insect from his pants pocket and placed it on the table. It had netted wings and a central body with pointed metallic feet. “Mr. Molloy tells me he used it in his escape from Agent Kestrel’s facility. It’s like a taser, but it appears to have much more severe effects on jackers. I haven’t had time to have it reverse engineered, but my guess is that it’s specially tuned to the electrical frequencies of jacker minds.” Julian was a study in opposites: he looked like someone from my high school, but he talked like a philosophy professor that would happily spend the day musing about the fascinating implications of jacker mind frequencies. His mind was something entirely different.

The tiny metallic butterfly tempted me from the table. A weapon other than my mind would be very handy in getting past Julian. I tore my gaze from it, hoping I hadn’t given away my thoughts.

Julian’s brow wrinkled. “It shouldn’t be taking you this long to recover. I can’t imagine that keepers are any more affected by the butterfly. If anything, it should be the opposite.”

I shrugged and looked for a way to change the subject so Julian wouldn’t get too suspicious. Raf’s deep artificial sleep on the couch was also going to be a problem.

“It’s giving me the creeps to see Raf like that,” I said. “If we’re going to work on this Kestrel thing together, I want him awake.”

“If he’s awake,” Julian said, “he’ll know far more than I’d like for any reader to know about where we live. He can’t know anything about our plans. It’s much better for him to sleep until we’re through.”

Better for Julian, maybe, but not so much for my escape plans. For that, I needed Raf awake and ready to run. “I’ll wipe his mind. He won’t remember a thing about this place or any of you.”

Julian cocked his head. “You are so attached to him, yet willing to wipe his memories? Does he not mind? It’s fascinating that you hold such a person, someone you can so readily control, so close. I have to say, keeper, I didn’t think you were the type of person who enjoyed that kind of power.”

I gripped my blanket a little tighter. “Just wake him up.”

Julian waved a hand in Raf’s direction. “Do it yourself,” he challenged me. I made a great show of focusing on Raf. I could easily have lifted his heart rate and summoned him from that deep sleep, but I faked frustration instead.

“I can’t! Your butterfly has wiped me out!”

Julian sighed and waved Ava over to wake up Raf. I don’t know why Julian didn’t do the jacking himself, but my body flooded with relief to see Raf rub his eyes and struggle to sit up. I hesitated to link into his head, not wanting Ava to sense my mental strength, and I put an artificial stumble in my walk. The couch was overly soft, and I sank way too deep into it, but I managed to wrap my blanket around Raf’s shoulders.

The look on Raf’s face betrayed his panic. He couldn’t read Ava’s or Julian’s thoughts and surely knew right away that they were jackers. He shrugged aside the blanket and wrapped a protective arm around me, glaring at Julian and Ava as if they were circling tigers ready to pounce.

Ava smiled but averted her eyes, the automatic embarrassed reaction of readers and jackers alike to blatant in-the-open touching.

Julian’s face had gone blank. “Now I see how it is.”

My heart sank as I realized the tactical advantage I had just lost. My earlier actions had given away that I cared for Raf, but as long as Raf was asleep, Julian could imagine I used him for my own selfish purposes. An awake Raf radiating his love for me? Unless Julian thought I was truly a monster, he had to see right through my claim that I would wipe Raf’s memories. I linked into Raf’s mind, hoping Ava had fled and ready to shove Julian out, but was surprised to find them not there.

Less of a surprise was that Raf was freaking out.
Are you okay, Kira? What’s going on? Who are these people? How did we get here?
His fresh-linen mind-scent was laced with the sour bite of fear.

It’s okay
, I linked to him.
I have a plan. Just stay calm.

Unfortunately, that’s when Raf noticed the bruise on my cheek. He gingerly touched my face and I struggled not to wince.
What have they done to you?
The look he threw at Julian would have killed him on the spot if Raf was a jacker. Julian caught his stare and held it with a dangerous glare of his own. Raf’s thoughts burned in my head.
Did he hurt you, Kira? I swear, if he hurt you
…

I could feel the heat of Julian’s eyes on us, and I had to stop Raf’s train of thought, but the idea of jacking him made my heart twist. I needed a monumental-sized distraction that would stop them both at once.

I shoved my fingers through the soft curls at the back of Raf’s neck and pulled him into a fierce kiss. It short-circuited his thoughts as fast as if I had jacked them clean. While he scrambled to figure out what I was doing, I brushed Ava’s mind. She had turned her back on us, just as I had hoped. I didn’t dare reach for Julian, afraid any contact with his mind would bring on another horror show. I heard a huff from the table, as well as a creak from his chair and the quiet padding of his footsteps across the industrial carpeting.

I kept kissing Raf until I was sure Julian wasn’t coming back.

When I pulled away, Raf’s thoughts were substantially less freaked and the sour scent in his mind had faded.
Well, this isn’t the most romantic setting I can think of
,
but it is an improvement over the dumpster.

I couldn’t help but smile; then I stole a glance at the table. Julian had left the butterfly there. I restrained my urge to leap up and grab it. I needed to be smart about this, but we needed to act fast.

I left the blanket with Raf, placing it forcefully into his hands. “You probably need this more than I do.”
Be ready.
I stayed linked into his mind, but I didn’t want to tell him my plans, in case Ava linked in. I shuffled to the table and picked up the metallic butterfly while Ava’s back was turned, tucking it into my palm and covering it with the mug of tea.