Mind Secrets: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 1) (21 page)

He blinked open his eyes to see Ransom in front of him. His stomach spasmed like he was about to be sick. He tasted vomit at the back of his throat. He swallowed it down. It was a weird, nauseating reversal. From being Ransom looking at Michael one moment, to being himself looking at Ransom the next.

Ransom let go of one of Michael’s hands and touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” said Michael, shaking his head. He didn’t really know if he was all right or not, but it didn’t matter because he needed to know more. “Take me back in.”

“Are you sure?” said Ransom.

“I have to know.”

“Okay.” Ransom took Michael’s hand again. “I won’t take you through the cure procedure. That’s uncomfortable for me to remember, but I can show you the rest. Perceive me again.”

Michael looked through Ransom’s eyes and into his mind …

… He became aware of Ransom’s memory. He was sitting on the floor in front of the remembered version of Michael: his hair dishevelled from the struggle with one sleeve still rolled up. His head wavered from side to side under the touch of Ransom’s fingers.

He was not deep in the memory. He watched, rather than felt, himself as Ransom with Page beside him while both of them were inside his – Michael’s – mind.

In this memory, Ransom was aware that Michael was fighting the cure. Despite the sedative, Michael was not giving in. He shook free from Ransom’s hands and pushed him out of his head.

The sudden force of expelling Ransom sent a lightning pain through Ransom which knocked him backwards. Everything went fuzzy and black as Ransom reeled from the shock.

Michael was on his feet, the rucksack in his hand, wild confusion in his eyes.

Rachel was beside him. Unsteady on her feet, but not so incapacitated as Ransom. She took a step towards Michael. He stepped away. He reached into his rucksack and pulled out a knife. A kitchen knife with a wide blade of sharpened stainless steel. Ransom recognised it as part of their own set of kitchen knives at home.

Michael pointed it at Page, making sure she kept her distance, then at Ransom, before he turned and ran.

“Michael!” Page called after him.

She turned to Ransom; aghast. All Ransom could do was clutch his head.

A ringing pierced his ears. It was the telephone on his desk.

Page was halfway to the door when she stopped.

“Go after him!” urged Ransom.

“I asked security to call if Cooper came into the building,” said Page.

“Shit!” said Ransom to himself. A migraine was descending. He tried – and failed – to close his ears against the ringing telephone …

The memory faded. Michael pulled himself out of Ransom’s mind and found himself, once again, sitting in the cell with Ransom holding his hands.

The question he had held in his head for weeks had been answered. His memory loss, as he suspected, had been caused by the cure. He had been too strong, too resistant to it, that he broke free in the middle, damaging part of his brain as he pulled out. He must have made it down a couple of floors of the office building and into a corridor before he passed out.

Michael leant back on the bed and Ransom’s fingers fell away. He looked up at his father’s face and saw, without having to perceive, the regret in his expression.

“Can you forgive me?” said Ransom.

“I don’t know,” said Michael.

The background rumble of perceptions started to crowd into Michael’s mind. He had little strength left to block them out. Little strength to perceive what Ransom felt now.

A knock on the cell door made him jump.

“Five minutes!” bellowed the guard.

Ransom wiped what might have been the start of a tear from his eye and sniffed to restore his composure. “I have to go,” he said. He looked round at the closed cell door as if to check no one was watching. He leant forward and whispered. “Don’t succumb to Bill Cooper. He’ll own you for the rest of your life. Hang on, Michael. I’m going to get you out of here, I promise.”

The sounds of turning locks echoed through the cell. The door opened and revealed the guard.

“You said five minutes,” said Ransom.

“Time’s up,” said the guard.

Ransom backed away towards the open door. He mouthed the words, ‘I promise’, and followed the guard out of the cell.

As the door closed and keys turned in the locks, Michael reached out his mind to his father. His perceived his sorrow for a moment before he walked away and his mind merged with the myriad perceptions of others. He didn’t have the energy to block them out and they rang loud inside his head. In the moment before they overwhelmed him, he wondered if he had the capacity to forgive his father for what he had done to him. Michael wasn’t sure he had.

CHAPTER TWENTY

MICHAEL STOOD
and allowed the woman to handcuff him behind his back. He was led out of the cell where Cooper was waiting for him.

“Got something to show you,” said Cooper.

At the end of the cell block, Cooper swiped his card. Michael listened with his mind as he tapped the combination on the keypad. Cooper’s whispered thought,
5 … 9 … 2 … 0
filtered through. Michael smiled: 5, 9, 2, 0. He would remember.

Cooper led them down the corridor that lay straight ahead. Through the double doors with a swipe and a combination,
3… 7… 8… 2
, and to a continuation of magnolia walls.

Only a few metres beyond that and he stopped beside a door on the left hand side of the corridor. A plaque screwed to the wood at eye level read,
Briefing Room
.

Cooper held open the door for Michael. The woman pushed him forward and, as he stepped inside, he smelt the staleness of dust which suggested the room had neither been aired nor cleaned in a while.

Cooper stayed in the doorway. “Thank you,” he said to the woman. “You may wait outside.”

“Sir.” She nodded.

Cooper let go of the door and it closed with the squeak of rarely used hinges.

The briefing room was dimly lit with painted white, solid walls. A spill of daylight found its way through a series of narrow windows above head height so Michael couldn’t see out of them. At the front was a small stage-like platform fronted by a bench-like desk and, on the wall behind it, a white screen that looked out onto racks of seating. Like a classroom or a lecture theatre.

Cooper hopped up onto the platform. “Well, come in, Michael. Come in.” He waved his hand in encouragement.

Michael took two wary steps. Ransom’s words, that Cooper would own him for the rest of his life, echoed in his mind.

“Are you uncomfortable?” said Cooper.

“No.”

Cooper smiled. “Sometimes, you don’t have to be a perceiver to tell when someone is lying.” He stepped back off the platform and stood in front of Michael. “Turn round.”

Goose pimples raised on Michael’s arms and down his spine. Turning his back on Cooper while they were alone together in the room felt dangerous. But he did it anyway.

He heard the jingle of keys behind him and felt the warmth of Cooper’s fingers on his wrists. With two, brief, metallic clicks, the handcuffs were released. Michael felt the relief of freedom and – rubbing his wrists to encourage circulation to return – he turned back.

Cooper held the handcuffs up to shoulder height. “I don’t think we need these anymore, do we?” He dropped them on the bench with a clatter. “We trust each other, don’t we?”

Everything he knew about Cooper suggested there was a level of
distrust
between them, but Michael was not about to argue the point.

“Take a pew.” Cooper gestured at the front row of seats. Michael took it as an invitation to sit.

Cooper leant back against the bench and folded his arms across his flabby chest. “Thought any more about my offer?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Michael shrugged.

“I heard you spoke to your father yesterday. What did he say about me?”

“Nothing much.”

Cooper raised his eyebrows. “From what I know of Brian Ransom, I’m sure it was nothing good.”

“He said, if I signed up with you, there would be no going back.”

Cooper shrugged. “I’ll be honest with you. Soon enough, life outside this complex as a perceiver will be virtually impossible. It’s only a matter of time before legislation makes it official. What I’m saying is, Michael, your only choice is to sign up with me.”

“Or I could be cured.”

“You don’t want that,” said Cooper.

Michael had thought he didn’t want it. But getting his perception back had made his life worse, not better.

“Anyway—” Cooper spun around on his heels and hopped up the small step onto the platform “—I said I wanted to show you something. And so I do.”

He touched the top of the bench. There was probably a computer screen or control panel embedded in the wood because, at the behest of his fingers, the screen on the wall flickered and an image appeared. It was a paused video image of a queue of blurry people taken from a vantage point above the entrance of some sort of building. Cooper touched the panel once more. The images started to move.

A woman’s voiceover emerged from two speakers on either side of the wall: “This CCTV footage shows everything was normal at the start of the day at the cure clinic in West London.” The images showed what looked to be parents and their teenage children, some of which looked barely thirteen, standing on a pathway.

“Nobody knows what happened, but something sparked the teenagers into violence.”

The image changed to shaky eye-level footage of angry teenagers throwing bottles. “This footage was posted anonymously to a pro-perceivers website. Although we’ve been unable to verify its source, witnesses say it’s an accurate reflection of what happened.” A woman in a white coat was dragged by her hair out of the building and into the shade of a tree where she was kicked by a boy of about fourteen years old while an older girl urged him on.

The image then changed to show a dozen teenagers – their backs to the camera – pounding fists into the air. Chanting: “
We won’t be cured! We won’t be cured
!”

“A doctor was taken to hospital where she was treated for minor injuries,” said the voiceover. “Damage to the building was superficial, but staff and visitors to the clinic have told us they were frightened for their lives.”

The images became steady, sharp and professional. They were taken from outside the grounds of the building which was surrounded by the yellow tape of a police cordon. Uniformed officers stood on guard with no sign of the teenagers. This, it seemed, was the aftermath.

The camera panned to show the reporter at the scene, a suited woman in a warm coat with a scarf round her neck: the same one who provided the voiceover. “It’s thought what happened here today was organised by those opposed to the normalisation of our teenagers,” she said, looking directly into the camera. “Police believe an underground network – possibly of teenagers themselves – is gathering momentum. And, from this evidence, gaining support. Officially, officers say they are following a number of leads and are appealing for members of the public with any information to come forward. But a source close to the investigation told me, they may be close to isolating the ring leaders.”

The images returned to the shaky footage of teenagers throwing missiles at the clinic. As it closed in on one of them, Cooper stopped the playback.

Michael looked at the heavy-set older teenager with shocking blond hair and a shiver of recognition passed through him.

“I think we know who this person is, don’t we?” said Cooper.

Michael shrugged.

“Oh, come on. Don’t you recognise your friend? It’s Oliver Smith, isn’t it? The one who abandoned you in the hotel room by jumping out of the window.”

“He didn’t abandon me,” said Michael.

“If you say so. The news report is interesting, though, don’t you think?”

“Are you threatening me?” said Michael. He could be using Otis as a bargaining chip, just as he used Michael as a bargaining chip with his father.

“It’s no threat, Michael. It’s just more information so you can make a decision. I wanted you to realise what the world’s like outside. Some perceivers – like your friend Smith – want to plunge us into civil war. I want to prevent that. Either way, perceivers will be caught in the middle. There will be no place for your kind in society, whether they’re cured or arrested. What I’m offering you is a chance to avoid all of that, to serve your country.”

Michael didn’t want to serve a country that forced its teenagers to be ‘cured’ of something that wasn’t a disease. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a cell either. Or to allow someone to get inside his mind and destroy his perception, along with whatever else of his brain in the process. He wanted another choice. He
needed
another choice.

“Why me?” said Michael.

Cooper smiled. “I thought you might ask that. Why am I wasting my time with you when there are thousands of other perceivers out there? Because you’re special, Michael. If there’s one thing I agree with your father about, then it’s that. Have you heard of other teenagers crying out in pain when they first experience perception?”

Cooper waited, allowing Michael to consider his question.

“You haven’t heard of it,” said Cooper, “because it doesn’t happen. Do others say they can perceive the minds of others around them all the time? That the whispers are always there in the background? They don’t say it because they don’t experience it. You’re strong, Michael. Stronger than anyone else. Your father knew what he was doing when he created you. You can be more valuable to me than anyone else. You can perceive more than anyone else. That’s why I want to find a role for you.”