Marked (25 page)

He dropped me off at my apartment building, taking the one twenty-ROC note I'd saved for the trip without complaint. It was at least three dollars short, never mind the tip, but he'd said he appreciated me listening.

And now the tall building sat under the streetlight, the cracked and worn steps mocking me.

I climbed them, slowly, and then the stairs up to my floor, the minds all around quiet and sleepy. Every step had an axiom from the program. Most all of them held Swartz's voice, line after line of wisdom and censure mixed together.

When I reached my apartment, I put the bag with the drug on the coffee table. I sat, in front of it, telling myself tomorrow might be it. They might kill me, if my idea, if my plan didn't go well. Rex might kill me, for accusing him.

But all of that, no matter how it happened, all of that would still make Swartz proud if I stood up like a man. If I did what I thought was right and changed what I could and accepted what I couldn't.

If . . . if I didn't take the poison in front of me. Hangovers destroyed lives, Swartz said, but the highs were worse, because they seduced the very life from you.

I threw away the damn drug.

And then I sat, in the middle of my bedroom's wave generator, and called Swartz.

Selah picked up, bleary, but that was okay. She still let Swartz tell me he was proud of me before I had to hang up.

CHAPTER 22

The next morning
dawned bright and early. Too early. Far, far too early.

Captain Harris drove me there in total silence, my own nerves threatening to get the best of me.

Cherabino probably wouldn't have driven me anyway, not after our last fight.

•   •   •

The captain's Guild pass was yellow, a bright, cheery canary color with lettering on both sides and a picture of him as a much younger man. I had never seen a yellow Guild pass. White, green, red, pink, silver, and many other colors, but never yellow. Perhaps it was only that the pass was so old, from a time when I'd still been in early Guild schooling. Perhaps not.

Even under full lockdown, that pass got Captain Harris admitted to the Guild immediately, the guard in the atrium giving him a smile and a greeting. I, on the other hand, got only censure.

The tension was building in me with every beat of my heart.
Boom. Boom.

Would this work?

Boom. Boom.

Would I . . . as me . . . leave the Guild intact? I had a fistful of dice, no more.

Boom.

Finally we stood outside the Guild Council chamber, once again with no seats to wait on. The most annoying company run by normals had seats to wait on. Not this one. Not the Guild.

Jamie was waiting for us. She was surprised—and happy, and sad—to see Harris.

“Justin.” Her voice was even.

“Jamie.” So was his. Unimaginable currents lay between them, in a dimension much deeper than Mindspace. One I couldn't touch and feel.

And then the moment was over.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Jamie quietly.

“I'm here to stand with you. I've already spoken my piece.” She looked away then, and I could feel her sorrow, her grief, starting to creep out of the bounds she'd placed around them. She held her arms together, one thumb running over her wrist, back and forth, back and forth, the physical sensation designed to calm her, to override her emotions. It was working, slowly; most of what she projected without meaning to was that calm movement. At a Level Ten, Jamie had all sorts of coping mechanisms no one else had to have, like a giant who had to be careful where he placed his feet. I felt the deep grief leaking out again.

You knew the people in the flyer that crashed?
I asked quietly.

All of them. Some were students. Some . . . some I knew in school myself.
She sent layer upon layer of faces and memories and emotions. Then she stopped, pulling it in.

There was nothing to say in the face of such facts.
I'm sorry,
I said, the words hurting me as the situation hurt me.

Before she pulled away, I saw one, small thought: she had missed me too, mourned my loss with so many others. Del Meyers too. Too much death, too much loss. At least I'd come back. The others . . .

Without any real Ability beyond whatever Link they'd once had, Harris pulled the taller Jamie into an embrace, rubbing her back. She was stiff, but collapsed into it finally, crying.

I was disconcerted. I'd seen Jamie cry perhaps twice, ever. If she was crying, the world had fallen apart.

The door opened and the court officer said quietly, “They will see you now.”

I trudged in and faced the court that could be my death. Jamie and Harris followed, quietly, her wiping tears.

•   •   •

Diaz, the head of the Council, looked like he hadn't slept since the last time I'd seen him, like he'd aged ten years in two days. Even Rex had his polish scraped off, and the others—what there were of them—haggard. Except for Johanna, but her makeup was piled on deeper than I'd seen before. The Research chair, who'd had the questions asked about her department earlier, was noticeably absent, as was Charlie, my old classmate. Green was angry, fighting stupid angry, but the rest of the Council was full of sadness and shock. All of Mindspace rang with it, until it shattered your soul.

Diaz's hand shook.

After the court officer introduced me and Jamie, she introduced Harris by name and the rank “neutral person.” Diaz paid a lot of attention then.

“I've heard of the flyer crash,” I told the Council. “You have my sincerest sorrow with you. If there is any aid I can give, I will give it.”

“Thank you,” Kim Lee said, the woman in charge of Finance, and the only woman at the table by appointment. The others had died or been replaced all too recently. “The Guild calls on all its members in need.”
You are not a member,
her mind implied.

Adam Ward,
Rex said, with a dark satisfaction. “You are accused of conspiring against Guild interests and providing false accusations leading to unnecessary harm of a high-ranking Guild citizen, accusations that may or may not have led to a decrease in security that contributed to the death of leading Council members. Is there anything you have to say before you are sentenced?”

Harris held up his yellow badge. “I am here as mediator for the matter of Adam Ward, a man who belongs to both the Abled and Normal worlds. What proof exists that Ward is conspiring against anyone? Who are his conspirators? What is the nature of the lapse in security?”

Whispering went across the chamber.

The evidence has been . . .
Diaz trailed off, and switched to spoken word. “The evidence has been presented to the Council over the last two days.”

“By who?”

“Many Council members have worked tirelessly to bring detailed information to our attention. Most of this information is not available to anyone outside the Guild.”

I noticed that Edgar Stone stood, quietly, at the right, near enough to the Council to be called on but not so near that anyone would think he had real power. He was that heavily shielded mirror I'd seen from him before, almost not-there in Mindspace. But his physical body language, the thing that always gave him away, told me he was uncomfortable with the collection of evidence they were talking about. I went a little cold at that.

I'd better start my play, or I'd risk being caught in someone else's.

Green sent a private message that I caught the edge of. The message had gone to Johanna, I thought, or the Council member past her. And suddenly I noticed something I hadn't before.

I had had a complicated plan worked out, one that accused Rex and took him down with me for conspiring with Guild First and not the Guild as a whole. One that had counted on Kara's family here. One that gave me half a chance or better to walk out of this, I'd thought.

But Kara's family was nowhere to be seen. And as Harris asked more questions and the Council answered them, my attention had been caught by Johanna.

Her mind, like all the others in the chamber, projected a leashed distress and sorrow and sadness. In fact, the emotions were exactly—exactly—the mix currently in the mind of Kim Lee right now. That was not what had caught my attention.

When people were truly sad, truly overcontrolling their grief and emotions, they looked down. They hunched. Or they sat too straight, too controlled. When people had the emotions I was feeling out of Johanna, there were certain ways their hands folded, their bodies sat, their eyes grew red.

But not Johanna. Her face was scrunched, like an exaggerated bad-actor portrayal of grief. And her hand, her hand stroked her wrist over and over again.

That was Jamie's strong-emotions habit. I'd never seen anyone else use it. And more important, I wasn't getting any projection of the physical sensation over Mindspace. It was like Johanna had seen Jamie and was copying her blindly, the gesture like the mental copying of Lee's emotions, aping of the people around her without any true feeling.

If you weren't looking too closely, if you depended on Mindspace as your primary sense, overriding all others, Johanna seemed just like everyone else in the room. But if you looked at her like a normal, only from the outside—

She was very charming, very helpful, wasn't she? Hadn't she reflected every single thing she'd thought I'd wanted to hear?

And she was sitting in a row with some of the most powerful and influential people in the Guild. She'd gone from an assistant who fetched coffee to a woman of real power in the space of a couple of weeks.

What had Kara said? With the Council so decimated, they'd promote anyone with experience, do whatever it took, call for elections?

And who would win those elections? The woman who'd already dealt with a mental health crisis as Health and Human Services acting chair? What did I want to bet that the “madness scare” would flare up over the next week, only to die when she implemented a new policy?

The puzzle pieces moved together. I'd thought it was Rex who'd benefitted most. I'd thought it was Rex who'd done this. But his people would be watched like hawks during the next year. They were suspected of killing opponents now. His days of subtle maneuvering would be over.

But Johanna—there was a reason she'd put my back up in the beginning. She was one of Those People, one of the sociopaths I'd met in the interview rooms. One of the people who truly felt no empathy for other people, no fellow feeling. That's why her body language didn't match her Mindspace signature; in a world of telepaths she'd had to learn to fake the one flawlessly but not necessarily the other. Telepaths trusted the evidence of their own minds.

And the evidence of their senses. She'd planted the mind control devices, hadn't she? I'd seen her talking to the old Research chair. She'd started all of this moving, and then had the gall to accuse a good man of madness to make it seem more real.

How many had died? How many more had their careers destroyed to have her sitting there?

“Ward was in the presence of multiple police officers during that time period,” Harris said. “Even he can't be two places at once. Unless you think some of that was done in advance . . . ?”

Edgar Stone shook his head, projecting his words loudly. “There was a full inspection the day before. The technicians have been mind-probed. The vehicle checked out. Whatever happened was during that time period.”

“Wait,” I said.

They ignored me.

Tubbs, Kara's ultimate boss, said, “Ward has plenty of criminal contacts. It was him that told us about Fiske to start with. Who's to say he didn't have one of his contacts—perhaps Fiske himself—do the honors? A mind-probe here seems justified.”

Faintly, on the level of a faint normal mind, I felt anger enter the air from Harris next to me. “We've repeatedly screened Ward. These past months, we've been monitoring him heavier than ever. He's purchased his drug this last week, but that was a low-level criminal who wouldn't be capable of what you're suggesting. He hasn't seen or talked to anyone else.”

“You know about that?” I stared.

He turned, mouth down. “Paulsen was geared up to defend your job to the political powers that be before you quit. And then you go and do this. I'm very disappointed. You'll be taking a drug test when this is all over.”

“Ah,” I said, numb. How did they . . . ?

Stone was looking at me, waiting for me to meet his eyes. One small nod.

I swallowed. “Seriously, wait. I have something to say.”

And I felt Jamie's presence in the public part of my mind. I hadn't hidden anything. She saw the unused drugs—and she saw my conclusions about Johanna. She started moving toward that part of the room.

“Silence,” Rex said. “The prisoner will not speak.”

Green's contempt projected across the room.
You've proven your character or lack thereof many times. This sabotage happened only when you reentered the Guild. The timing cannot be coincidence.

I took a deep breath, and projected as loud as I could.
We've all been manipulated! We've all been led to believe—

A force like a sledgehammer hit my mind. I staggered, pain and pressure knocking me sideways.

Tubbs, Kara's ultimate boss, held the other end. “You cannot respect protocol even in the hour of your sentencing.”

He had locked down on my mind, literally locked down, until I could do nothing, say nothing. I was a prisoner in my body. I beat against the restraint like a bird whose foot was caught in a trap, wings beating as hard as muscle and bone would support—hurting only myself.

I was a Level Eight telepath! I would be free!

The restraint held.

Level Eight no longer,
Tubbs said to me, quietly.
Stay still or I will make you.

I tried to send him my suspicions about Johanna, but he cut me off, like a wet blanket.

Pay attention.
My mind was forced to the front, to the outside.

Rex smiled, a small cruel smile. “For your crimes, the Guild will sentence you—”

Diaz put a hand out, in front of him, where the man couldn't help but see it.

And then the double doors crashed open, and Kara's family, thirty strong, arrived in a wind of teleporters and firestarters and unthinkably strong Ability.

Hawk Chenoa, one of the strongest and most politically powerful men in the Guild, the Guild's primary liaison with the United States Military Services, stepped forward. “Council of the Guild, we bring challenge. Under the bylaws of the Guild, if you repeatedly endanger high-ranking full members, we have the right.”

Tubbs's grip slipped, and I had my Mindspace senses back. My senses, but not my freedom.

Concern and shock radiated from every person on the Council. Every person, that was, except Johanna.

My attention returned to her in time to catch one, small smile.

Diaz threw a bolt of energy into the center of Mindspace.

The world turned over, and I fell. Jamie still stood, Harris on his knees. Half of Kara's family behind me remained upright; the others shattered. But my mind was free, was clear. If I could just stand, just think . . .

I am still the Council,
Diaz said.
Mutiny is punishable by mind-wipe. Be very, very careful of what you say.