Mind Storm (32 page)

The people who knocked down the front door to get inside didn't know that.

Jason cut the light immediately, ducking into the nearest room on the first floor and raising a personal telekinetic shield around himself. He hadn't felt a telepathic probe, which didn't mean an attack wasn't pending. One of the many annoying things about being a telekinetic was that telekinetics were always targeted first. They had the only physically destructive, long-reaching psion power in existence. They could do a hell of a lot more damage to property and fragile human bodies than any other psion, and they were numerous enough to be a problem.

The people coming down the hallway found that out the hard way.

Jason couldn't be sure no psions were in the tenement. He didn't want to break cover, but he had no choice. He was the first line of defense and that meant going in for the kill. Stepping out of the room with a heavy telekinetic shield between himself and the intruders, Jason peered past the light coming from scopes mounted on the guns to see just who the hell he was dealing with.

Humans,
Lucas's voice said suddenly into his mind.
Quads. I've got them.

No,
Jason said.
Your telepathy might ping off the mental grid during the attack.

You're kidding, right?

You've got a lot to handle already, so let me deal with them.

Their conversation lasted no more than a second or two, long enough for the quads to notice Jason. They took aim and fired, the flare of energy darts streaking down the hallway. Jason averted his eyes as the attack hit his telekinetic shield. Tapping into his telekinesis, Jason yanked the weapons out of their hands, wrapped his power around their skulls, and viciously twisted each head. The sound of bone cracking mimicked the thunder that still rolled outside. When their bodies hit the floor, it was with a familiar, distinctive sound.

Is that all of them?
Jason asked through the psi link, taking a careful step forward. When Lucas didn't immediately answer, Jason strengthened his thoughts beneath the other man's telepathic shields that turned him human on the mental grid.
Lucas!

I hear you, I hear you. No need to fucking yell,
Lucas said a few seconds later.
Those were it for this section. The only problem now is their check-in times.

Pretty sure they've got voice-recognition software on their comm units.

Yeah, so don't even bother trying to use them. Their superiors will just hone in on their last known location, which isn't here, but close enough to be a problem.

You think reinforcements will come after them in a city this big?

I think we're running out of time. Hide the bodies, then get below,
Lucas said, mental voice distant.

What's going on?

Those aren't the only quads I have to deal with. The place rigged to blow yet?

I'm just checking Matron's work.

That woman never fucks up her bombs. Just get back to the shuttles.

Jason left his position, telekinesis still a strong barrier between himself and the rest of the world. He used it to teleport the two sets of quads out of the hallway and into an abandoned room on the top floor, stacking the bodies against the wall behind a pile of scavenged junk. Out of sight, out of mind.

The lock had been shot off the front door, leaving a hole that acid rain blew through. Jason telekinetically shoved a table in front of the door to keep it shut before retreating back to the tunnel. He checked the position of the blast doors on his way back down, telekinetically holding the flashlight in the air to help him see as he made sure the two main doors in that room wouldn't close. Only then did Jason take the stairs two at a time back down to the tunnel.

We're finished with the hive connection,
Jason reported, leaving his thoughts open for Lucas to retrieve.

Good. I'm pretty sure we're only going to have a narrow window of time to get all the shuttles airborne.
Lucas sounded tense, power bleeding against Jason's shields. The lack of control was startling.

Lucas, what's wrong?

We haven't been found out, not yet,
Lucas said, ignoring Jason's concern.
The quads are pushing through the typical boundaries. They're hitting up the outskirts.

Jason swore.
The other hangars?

No one's been discovered yet, but I've got other problems to deal with.

How far along are Threnody and the others on getting the electrical grid back up and running?

Not far enough.

Jason didn't know what to say in response, so he kept his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself as he worked his way back to the hangar. He double-checked that the blast doors were secured in their retractable casings. When he reached the underground hangar, the cargo doors of the Alpha shuttle were the only ones open. He clambered back inside, the doors closing behind him as he made his way back to the flight deck.

Matron was there, busily running through diagnostics of the shuttle. She didn't look at him. “We good?”

“Yeah,” Jason said as he sat down in the navigator's seat, staring out into the darkness of the hangar. “For now.”

Matron grunted, whispering something under her breath. He had to strain to hear her, but he managed to make out a few words, just enough to realize she was praying.

“That ever work?” Jason felt compelled to ask.

“Does what work?”

“Whatever you just asked your God for.”

Matron offered him a sharp look. “Boy, you leave me and my prayers in peace. If I'm gonna get through this sane, I'm gonna need a little bit of guidance of the sort your government never programmed into you. When you find God, then we'll talk.”

He didn't bother to tell her that the Strykers already had, in some way, that it wasn't a god they worshipped, but humanity itself. It was why he was still here, still working with Lucas instead of fighting him, because this course of action made more sense than the one the government was determined to take.

Matron rolled her shoulders, trying to ease some of the tension in her muscles. “Make yourself useful and go check what medical supplies we've got back there. I've got a feeling we're gonna need them.”

Jason obeyed. Maybe it would keep his mind occupied instead of thinking and worrying about his fellow Strykers in the field.

It didn't.

[
TWENTY-NINE
]

AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA

She fell.

Telepaths' minds were layers of control and power, memory from birth to now, perfect recall, and a silent plea that the space in their head remained theirs for just a little longer; that their thoughts and who they were remained
them
and not
other
. Control meant keeping that separation intact. Power meant being able to live through the aftermath of when control wasn't enough and everything in their head just broke down.

Pieces of who she was, who she had been, cut into her thoughts.

Samantha swallowed blood and snot, wiping at her nose. It felt as if her brain were leaking out of her nostrils. Just her mind playing tricks on her, she decided as she studied her bloodstained fingers. Just everything and nothing, because this wasn't what she was supposed to be.

She'd lived nearly her entire life broken. Eighteen years of a
very
slow mindwipe.

How had she missed that?

Arms wrapped around her waist, and Samantha looked down at her sister, Kristen's thin face turned upward. Her gleaming dark blue eyes were hooded, knowing, mouth curved hard in that gleeful smile of hers.

“Shh,” Kristen whispered through the noise of the crowd around them in Bunker North. “It always hurts the first time. When you learn to think for yourself.”

Samantha dug her nails into her sister's shoulder, held on, because the world was moving without her. Clarity. It was such a fucking bitch.

“I've always thought for myself,” Samantha ground out, pitching her voice low, because she couldn't focus enough to
think,
much less use her telepathy.

“No. Nathan thought for you.”

Truth never tasted so bitter, so bad. Samantha swallowed against the bile that was crawling up her throat, stomach clenching from pain, nausea making her a little weak. Kristen held her up as they followed Jin Li away from the maglev platform, a few new Warhounds surrounding them as they continued the hunt for Lucas. More telekinetics and two telepaths, because she couldn't fully perform her duties anymore.

Do I want to?
she thought somewhere inside the mess of her head, shields barely strung together. Too many minds pressed against her own. It was difficult to remember why they were here, what they had been ordered to accomplish. It was difficult to care.

The hardest thoughts to ignore were her sister's. Kristen was a pulsing, sick presence on the mental grid, a deep well of borrowed emotion and little sanity, despite all the minds she had eaten through that night. The strange thing was that she wasn't intruding, wasn't trying to pull apart Samantha's weakness. The empath never gave up an opportunity to eat her way through someone else's mind; this should have been no different from all the times before. Only it was and Kristen's distance wasn't comforting at all.

“We need to get aboveground,” Jin Li said, looking over his shoulder at Nathan's children. “Lucas isn't down here.”

“I'm searching through the human minds around us,” one of the telepaths said. “I'm not sensing any hidden pockets that he's carved for himself. Just—”

She broke off with a frown, dark head turned in the direction of a set of quads behind them who were ignoring the Warhounds through psionic interference.

“What is it?” Samantha felt compelled to ask.

“They're getting a report from their command central. Something about a break-in at the power plant.”

Jin Li rocked to a hard halt, ignoring the humans flowing around him as if he weren't even there. “The power plant? Which one? And what the hell is Lucas doing there?”

“Are you sure it's even him?” Samantha said. “Of the three Strykers he took, one's an electrokinetic. The only reason why they could possibly be there would be because they want to turn it back on.”

“Want to? Or need to?” Kristen corrected as she chewed on a fingernail until it bled.

Samantha rubbed a hand over her face. They'd lost their identity-protective glasses a while ago, but the bioware was still attached to their skin. They had their hackers working through the security grid to circumvent the feed, all of them knowing that the Strykers were most likely doing the same. She didn't think it would be enough in the long run.

Jin Li focused his attention on the other telepaths in the group. “Can we get a fix on whoever it is?”

They all looked away in order to concentrate, closing their eyes and merging their powers together. The whole group was stretched out in the crowd, pressed close against the side of the bunker's wall on the second level, unnoticed only by way of psionic interference and hackers in the system. Samantha took in a careful, shallow breath and felt another layer inside her head shear off.

Kristen's power seeped into her mind, sliding past her shields with jagged edges. Emotions weren't something that Samantha had the luxury of feeling; Kristen lived them, day in and day out. It hurt, drawing her sister into a link, as if her mind were being torn to pieces all over again.

And again.

Listen.
Kristen's thoughts, soft, modulated, backed by a coherence that Samantha had never before felt in that tangled, ruined mess of a mind.

Samantha had spent all of her life learning when to bend so that she wouldn't break. All Warhounds learned that skill early. The Serca children of any generation learned it earlier than most. Samantha raised a shield between herself and her sister, forcing Kristen out of her mind. It left her with an almost debilitating headache, but she'd lived through worse over the years. Compartmentalizing the pain was easy. Ignoring her sister was not.

Kristen leaned up to press her mouth against Samantha's ear, her voice barely distinguishable from the noise of the crowd.

“You're going about this all wrong, Sam.”

Kristen's voice, but not her words. Only one person had ever called her Sam.

She would have pushed Kristen away, except the younger girl was holding on to her so tightly that it was impossible to shake her off completely.

Traitor,
Samantha thought, shoving the word straight into Kristen's mind, ignoring how it made her own bleed psionic pain.

The empath smiled at her, her psi signature overlaid with Lucas's presence.
Tell me, Sam,
Lucas said through Kristen's mind.
How am I the traitor when I was the one who pieced your mind back together over and over again? You've got those memories back now. Aren't you grateful?

Not to you.

Still so sullen. We're going to have to work on that.
Lucas stretched his power through Kristen's mind, the empath's insanity a barrier between him and the scans that the Warhound telepaths were doing.
You know what Nathan wants. I want something different.

I'm not on your side.

Remember when I said I would save you? I never said it would be easy. Trust me, Sam. I'm all you've got left. Do you think you can go back to Nathan with your mind the way it is now?

She couldn't. She knew that it would be impossible to return to London, present herself to their father, and leave his presence alive. Nathan would take her changed state of mind as betrayal, and only one punishment fit that crime in the Warhound ranks.