The Shibboleth (30 page)

The shibboleth twists within me. So long in the hole, in the dark. And now another mind. Thing is, this life I lead, this terrible gift, I'm learning to use it. And I'm learning how
not
to use it. The people I tap, I don't want to see all their secrets. I don't want to know if their uncles touched their willies or their mothers abused them. I don't want to know their delicious ringing moments of joy and wonder. I don't want to know what makes them tick. All I want is to use them, to take them over and get what I need and get out. Because I don't want to have any empathy for them. I've got blisters on my fingers, and I can't worry about being a good boy anymore.

I go in, behind her eyes. I seep into her brain stem, shooting through the corpus callosum enough to know her power, to suck from her everything I need to know about what she can do.
It's a shallow, petty gift she has. She can move things, lift them, throw them about.

A poltergeist.

I have her now.

“Beneath that bell,” Ruark's voice says, echoing in the large space, bouncing off the stone walls, “is a slip of paper with a key code. That key code will allow the possessor to exit this room. The bell weighs one ton. That is two thousand, two hundred and forty pounds. There are pallets in the large locker near the bleachers on which you may rest.” She pauses. “You may not use the restroom, nor may you have food or water, until this test is complete. Do not urinate or defecate in this room or you will fail the test.”

Hollis looks at me with a blank expression. “That's no good. Too much coffee in the canteen this morning.”

Ruark's voice says, “No talking. You may begin the test.”

I close my eyes in my meatsuit and totally invest myself in the stonechucker's. Though I don't want to get to know her that well, I race down her hallways, looking at every way she's used her power. Throwing darts, rocks, garbage cans, sodas, food, bricks, lumber, acorns, dogs, cats, knives, water. There, right there, on the streets of Mumbai, her sister's leg trapped and mangled beneath a motorcycle. She snatches up the bike in a mental hand and tosses it away.

“Stand back,” I say to Hollis, who takes a couple of paces backward. “No, no. More than that. I've never done this before.”

He walks ten or fifteen feet away. “Here?”

“Perfect.”

I am in Galine like a virus, a fever. I spread myself out inside her, testing all the edges, sinking my tentacles and
tendrils into her psyche, filling her like a poison, a smoke. I am the Helmholz itself. I can feel her power thrumming instead of the tainted ether. I hold her/my body still, heavy with inaction, every muscle tense as guitar strings, rigid and vibrating like high-tension wires.

The bell reflects the light, dully, an inert yet massive service bell.

I dredge Galine's power up from the murky depths of her frame like I'm gathering myself for the mad leap into the wild blue yonder. I focus the kinesthesia, breathing in and holding the pregnant air inside Galine's chest.

I hold it. And hold it.

And
release
. The bell makes a dull, deep, and hollow sound, like someone striking an anvil with a hammer wrapped in velvet. It tilts some, just a little, enough to see from Galine's eyes a white rectangular object underneath. The slip of paper. But only for a second.

“Can you do that again?” Hollis asks. I can feel the ghost of Galine fluttering at the edges of my vision, trying to get back in. Trying to resume control of her body.

Hollis looks at my vacant body and then back to Galine. An expression of understanding crosses his features. “You weren't kidding about getting inside their heads, were you?”

I look at MeShreve, the original packaging that this bit of psychic leather came in, and his nose streams blood. I can taste it on MeGaline's lips too, bright and meaty, full of salt. Must be a gusher.

“No,” I say.

“Why don't you just let her do it?”

“I don't know.” There's a velocity to need. There's an
inertia to desperation. And I keep barreling forward even when I don't need to. Jerry said they'd become pawns to me, figures to be pushed around on a board. Quincrux gave me this terrible gift, but I'm reshaping myself in his image. Like father like son. What a horrible thought.

“Can you do it again?”

“I don't know. I've never done it before.”

I catch his shocked expression. I've hijacked this girl's ability. Maybe that's rare. Maybe if I knew it was rare, I wouldn't have been able to do it.

“I can shove something underneath right at the moment you tilt it up.” He shakes his head.

“That's a good idea.” The blood makes my words come with strange plosives, pops and bubbles.

Hollis runs to the edges of the gymnasium, looking for something to jam under the bell if I can raise it again.

I vacate Galine's body for a bit, and she slumps to the floor and begins blubbering and looking at her hands like she's lost something terribly valuable. Which she has, I guess.

I walk over to where she sits on the carpet. She looks up when I approach.

I hold out my hand to pull her up.

“Screw you. Screw you, you
shit
.”

The word hits too hard. It's all too much. For an instant, the world teeters and I feel all the people I've been come rushing back once more. I don't care. I don't care.

I do what I have to do.

Somewhere, Jerry's saying,
We will all become pawns to you. Tools for you to use.
And I have nothing to say for myself. Nothing.

The gymnasium yields nothing except an empty trash can, the collapsed wooden bleachers, and the bell.

“What about those?” Hollis asks, pointing at the bracing and metal framework on the ceiling. Above the bell that hides the key code is a matching metal ring, bolted into the living rock of the ceiling.

I jerk a thumb at Galine. “Let her try.”

“Look there,” Hollis says, pointing at an area of the ceiling we haven't examined as closely. “See that?”

There's some extra wiring coiled and zip-tied against the trussing that holds the lights.

“Yeah.” I can see where he's going with it.

“We could use that to lift the bell.”

“How?”

“Put it through that ring on the ceiling, tie it off on the bell. Use that as a pulley.”

“It literally weighs a ton, Hollis. Two thousand pounds.”

“It's worth a try,” he says, like he's trying to politely convince his coworkers that the new initiative will increase the bottom line.

“That idea is idiotic,” I say. “If I had to try to lift that damned bell, I'd herniate myself.”

“Okay, fine. What do you suggest?”

“You could use her power to fly up there …”

Galine holds up her hands and says, “No. Don't do that again. Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it.”

I glance at Hollis and then back to Galine. “Okay, fly up there and get that cable.”

“I—” She stops, looks at the expression on my face, and then starts again. “I can't. I can't fly.”

“No time to learn like the present.”

“I've tried. I can't.”

“You can throw things. Just throw yourself up there.”

“I can't.”

“Maybe I can.”

“No!”

“No what? You just said you can't. So I should give it a whirl. Slide over.”

Reluctantly, she stands. She looks terrified and furious all at once. “Okay. Okay!” She holds out her hands like I've got a gun on her. “Don't get any ideas.”

“I'm not going to do anything!”

“Let's just keep that straight, then.”

Hollis moves to stand by me. “You sound like a hillbilly gangster.”

I can't help but laugh.

“Listen,” Hollis says. “Maybe it would be easier if she—”

“Shut up for a second.”

Wheels moving, gears coming together. Thoughts move like glaciers.

“Jesus Christ on a crutch, this is stupid …” It becomes clear to me now. “You know what they did to me in the second test?”

Hollis shakes his head. Despite her disgust, Galine moves to stand by him, watching me.

“They showed me a freakin' video of my little brother getting the shit kicked out of him by one of his foster brothers.”

Hollis blinks a couple of times, thinking about it. He's not stupid, this one.

“They're not testing us to judge our abilities. They brought us here to break us down. To turn us on each other. Got me?”

“No.”

“I can get into people, right? You say you change perception, okay? And she's a stonechucker. Can't fly, can't move stuff too heavy. Why are we all in the same room?”

“To learn to work together as a team?”

“Bullshit. Maybe if this was in the comics or a movie. No, they want us to rip each other apart. It's survival of the fittest. And I'm not playing anymore.” I look at Galine. Her eyes are wide. Her mouth is covered with blood.

I did that to her. I am becoming a monster. They're making me into one. I'm a block of wood to be whittled down. A mound of clay to be formed. And when they're through, I won't look like me anymore. Not even to myself.

You'll be able to look yourself in the mirror.

I close my eyes, go into the ether, cloudlike and furious. I expand to take in the immediate surroundings in the space/ not space, the beyond. There's a Helmholtz field nearby, a very small but very powerful one, and it hisses and skitters like water dropped on a cast-iron skillet. That's where they'll be, inside that field. The force of its thrumming makes my spirit cringe and wither, but the anger is upon me. I withstand it, though not without pain. Within the field, even at its hideous strength, I find three flames above us, behind the mirrors. There's Ruark, some other woman, and a man watching us. I circle them, swimming in the ether like a shark, mouth full of jagged teeth.

It's the man I want. The man, I'm sure of it.

There's a moment's resistance, and then I'm inside, blinking, looking out of his eyes at the video monitors that show us in what I can only assume is thermal mode. The room
looks like the control center in a spaceship: computer screens, microphones, flashing lights. There's some sort of graph that indicates power levels and percentiles, but it's not marked.

His name is Bill Holden. Everyday average name, and I don't really care anything about the man except for what he can do, the special gift that keeps him incarcerado here. Because everyone is incarcerado here. Maybe even Quincrux himself.

I'm a bull now, a snorting, charging bull in his mental china shop, and I could give one shit about anything except finding his talent.

A buzzer sounds, and the dim awareness of it filters through his consciousness to me.

Ruark says, “Cannon's temperature is up again, so he's active. Inconclusive if he's using Galine again.”

The woman next to her, dressed in the ubiquitous black fatigues, says, “I don't think so.”

“What?”

“He's in Bill.”

My nose and face are crimson. I'm bleeding copious amounts of blood, just gouts of the salty, sticky stuff. Gonna have to leave Billy-Boy a few pints low after these shenanigans.

In and down. Burrowing, diving into his memories until I find the last time he used his talent.

Another brute, this one. But more than a stonechucker.

I have it all in a moment.

I step around the banks of computers to the one-way mirrored windows that look down on the gymnasium. I reach out my hand and, in my mind's eye, grasp the cold metal of the bell.

I squeeze.

It's not like crushing a can; it's more like crushing the distance between atoms. Even here, behind the window, I can hear the metal of the bell screaming, shrieking, and with a great dreamlike detachment note that Galine and Hollis are covering their ears, mouths open in screams.

I clutch the bell. I crush it. It warps and distends.

It is enough.

Ruark screams, “Up the field, up the field! Get Negata in there!” while her companion punches buttons and turns knobs on the machines. I smile at them with Billy-Boy's face, showing his teeth, red and covered in blood.

“Afternoon, ladies,” I say and vacate the premises.

I'm back in my body, and my ears are ringing, but not enough to stop me from walking forward, dropping down, and reaching my hand underneath the bent and distorted lip of the bell and snatching the slip of paper.

“Come on,” I say. I remember Casey—the girl with one arm—helping me. It's the least I can do. Galine and Hollis follow.

At the door, I tap the code into the keypad; the door buzzes and clicks. It swings open.

I step into the hall, that clean antiseptic expanse of tile and fluorescent light, only to find Mr. Negata.

He is not smiling.

And he holds a Taser.

They've taken Billy-Boy to the infirmary—they couldn't get his nose to stop bleeding—and now it's finger-wagging time. They've got me in another small room, probably the same one I was in earlier this morning.

Negata watches me implacably.

“How did you get through the Helmholtz field, Mr. Cannon?”

“What field? Did you check your devices? Maybe they weren't running.”

Ruark shakes her head, looks to her female companion, whose name tag reads Tanzer. Tanzer peers at her tablet computer, taps the screen, bites her lip. Eventually she says, “No, looks like it was running at ninety percent power, as instructed.”

Ruark turns back to me. “So how did you get through the Helmholtz field, Mr. Cannon?”

I shrug. Might as well tell them. “I just gritted my teeth and bullied through it.”

“No,” she says. “I don't believe you.”

“Huh. Yeah, it hurts, but you know—” Hard to figure why I can endure it and they can't. “Some folks take to suffering.”