Category: Novels

Rox could feel something poking her in the ribs, and remembered the radio she had clipped to her belt. She keyed it, and asked, “General Garrity?”

“Who the hell is this?” he asked, his voice faint, but still angry.

“Someone who wants to talk to Anita. You should oblige me; I might be the only one who can talk her down from mutilating you.”

“Little late,” he said angrily.

“You always did suffer from little man syndrome,” Anita said over the radio. “Now you’re just a slightly littler man- though even with the extent you overcompensate I’m not sure you can get to be a much bigger asshole. And I’d suggest you not try- or I might be inspired to make you considerably less of a man.”

Mai sniffed the air. “Think I have something,” she said, tilting back a small bust of Alexander the great, revealing a keypad. “You want to do the honors?” she asked Rox, stepping aside.

Rox hit a key, and the pad flashed red without accepting any input. “Garrity wanted me to tell you that the panic room locks down automatically for fifteen minutes,” Anita said over the radio. “No one in or out in that timeframe, even if you guess the code.”

Rox tossed Mai the radio. “I’ll keep at this, you keep her talking.”

“Uh,” Mai said, staring at the radio.

“You both lived through this hell,” Rox said. “That shared experience means you, better than probably any other human being on the planet, understands what she’s going through. Tell her that. And listen.”

“Hey,” Mai said.

“Huh,” Anita replied. “Putting the murderous, anti-social stoic on the radio. I did not see that coming. I mean- I wouldn’t have if that weren’t literally how my ability works.”

“Yeah,” Mai said, exhaling in an almost-chuckle. “Your friend out here moves in mysterious ways.”

“I’m curious if it’ll work,” Anita said. “A little part of me hopes it will,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t think I like how this ends, otherwise.”

“Oh?” Mai asked.

“Well, dysfunctional as our relationship’s always been, I’ve grown fond of those runaways. Wish I could say they look up to me, but it’s really mostly the reverse. I wish I were them- that I could be them. That we hadn’t lived through what we did. That I could start fresh. New. Unsoiled. Hopeful.”

“You aren’t,” Mai said softly. “Soiled, I mean. Life is hard. None of us make it through without scars. Some of our wounds never seem to scab over, they just fester, and hurt, and ruin anything they come into contact with. But even at my worst- and I’d bet my worst and yours are about neck and neck- I may have felt broken. And hopeless. And lost. Soiled. But I wasn’t. Losing my memory- even temporarily- it meant I got the illusion of being pure, and innocent, for a while. Maybe that made my transition easier- I don’t know. I still haven’t told my friends everything, because I worry, every day, that they’ll see me, the real me, the person you know and hate for a fucking reason-”

“Mai, I don’t-”

“Maybe not. Maybe that’s just projection- the same way I projected a lot of my anger and frustration and disappointment in myself onto you. But the point is, I’m a little worse-for-wear. A little cynical. And I don’t always know which way is up, let alone what’s right. But none of that damage is permanent, or irrevocable. Some of those wounds may never completely heal, and those that do will leave scars, but there is life after what we’ve lived through. And I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m sure as hell not saying it’s fair the weight you and I will always carry, but Anita, you survived what I thought at the time wasn’t survivable. And I know you can get through this, too. And even if I doubted you- I know you have people out here who care about you, who will support you. Who will take up some of that heavy load, if you just stop assuming they’ll hate you too much if you let them know who you really are.”

“I see why she gave you the radio,” Anita said. “She’s cleverer than anyone ever credits; it’s hard to see it, past the dumb luck.” “Got it,” Rox said, stepping back from the bust. The door lock disengaged, and the blast door lowered. “We’re in.”

Tucker’s phone rang, and he answered it. “So I have bad news,” Ryan said.

“Let me have it.”

“Agent Louie commandeered the bus. Put a gun to our driver, Miri’s, head, and is forcing her to drive him to campus. Apparently he did not notice the high end cameras we installed. On the plus side, we’ve captured the audio from a half-dozen of their phones, and we’re already uploading it to every news outlet in the hemisphere. The bad is that they’re about only a couple minutes out, and they plan to set off a riot. They say they have an ‘anonymous’ tip of an illegal in one of the dorms, so they’re going to go in and arrest anyone and everyone they ‘suspect’ of being here illegally. The other half of them are going to the records room, to burn every printed record, and destroy anything digital, too. It’s probably not enough to do what they want it to, but if we let them terrorize us here-”

“Then no Breed is going to feel safe anywhere.” Tucker hung up his phone. “Drake?” Tucker asked him.

“Yeah?” he thought back.

“You catch all that?”

“Of course.”

“How long would it take to transport all of us to campus?”

“I think I have a better idea. Where’s Iago?” Tucker reached out telepathically, and shared an image. “Follow me. I’ll need to know where the bus is, next.” Drake disappeared, and an instant later he was in their living room, where Iago was watching the news.

“They just played the audio,” Iago said. “What do you need me to do?”

Drake grabbed him, and they both teleported to the bottom of the hill leading to the school. “We need ice,” Drake said. “As much ice as you can put on that road.”

“Then you need to coordinate with Tucker so some student doesn’t try driving down the hill. Might even want a magnetokinetic, if he can find one.”

“Karl,” Tucker said in his mind. “He’s here, yellow dog shirt.”

Drake was gone in an instant, back with Tucker. “Karl!” they barked in unison, and a tall, wiry kid who couldn’t have been more than 17 stumbled out of the crowd. “You’re with me,” Drake said, and took his wrist, and they were gone.

Iago had already iced over several feet of the road. “Not sure why you started us on the corner,” Iago said. “That seems extra precarious.”

“That was the idea.”

“What’s the plan?” Karl asked.

“You’re playing catcher. Any cars hit this ice, I need you to set them as gently as you can in the ditch.”

“It really doesn’t work that way,” Karl said nervously.

“However it works, make it work,” Drake said. “We’re out of time and we’re out of options.”

“We’re stopping traffic at the top of the hill,” Drake heard Tucker in his head again. “And I warned the driver. She can heal herself- just don’t let anyone die. Oh, and she’s going to be there in about thirty seconds.”

“All right, we’re out of time,” Drake said out loud. “We need to make space. When the bus hits that ice it’s not going to be pretty.” Drake waved them towards the line of trees a few feet from the sidewalk.

“You know, I’ve always secretly wanted to do this,” Iago said. “I’m glad I finally get the chance- and that we’re doing it to such a deserving group of assholes.”

“Well don’t celebrate just yet. If we accidentally kill one of them, we’re going to enter an even bigger world of crap.”

“Crap?” Iago asked, frowning.

“Paradoxically, I swear less when I’m tense. Shit.”

The bus came roaring up the hill, and when it hit the ice careened towards the sidewalk opposite them. It jumped the curb like it wasn’t there, narrowly avoiding an apartment building and heading for an overgrown blackberry bush. “Uh,” Karl said, realizing that there was nothing behind the bush but a steep incline towards the grocery store a quarter mile down. He reached out his hand as the bus tilted from its wheels, its momentum keeping it sliding even as it fell, trailing a shower of sparks. “Uh,” Karl said, as he started to slide along with the bus.

“Anchor him,” Drake said, grabbing onto Karl’s arm to try and slow him. Iago froze his feet to the ground, and kept going until he was encased in a layer of ice several inches thick up to his neck. “Not, uh, entirely what I meant, but it worked.” The bus tried to roll one last time, which might have been enough to crest the hill, but Karl pulled his fingers back towards himself, and the bus settled back harmlessly into the parking lot.

“Uh, can you get me out?” Karl asked, his teeth chattering.

“Think so,” Drake said. “And you both need to get gone.” He grabbed Iago’s shoulder and the back of Karl’s head, and transported them both into their living room just up the hill. “Get him some hot chocolate or something,” he said, and disappeared.

Drake arrived just in time to see the bus doors open up. The driver, her face slicked with blood, climbed out. Iago teleported back to the apartment, stumbled into Karl who was in the process of stripping out of his shirt, and grabbed a roll of paper towels before returning. He handed the roll to the driver, who wiped her face. A single small cut was all that remained, and closed up an instant later. “That sucked,” she said. “Though it beat the alternative. Not sure they’re down for the count, though. We might not want to stick around.” “No, probably not,” Drake said. “But my roommate’s making hot cocoa.” Drake took her hand, and they both disappeared.

“Fessuns,” Garrity said, wrapping his belt around his wrist and tightening it with his teeth to control the bleeding. “Always figured it would be one of you that finally punched my ticket. Though I’d have loved to be wrong.”

“Shut up,” Anita said, holding her head, “I don’t care.”

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Aside from the obvious instability that would lead you to break in here and maim me.”

She pointed her blade into his stomach, enough that he could feel the edge through his shirt but not quite enough to break the skin. “I’m trying to decide whether to stab you to death.”

“I’d much prefer a gun, if you’re asking for input.”

“I wasn’t. And if I were, I’d probably be looking for what you want the least.” She closed her eyes, clearly struggling. “I wasn’t prepared, to see you again. Even seeing your picture- it put me back there. I practically ran through your facility; I couldn’t begin to tell you if I killed anyone on the way. No- I did, but I couldn’t tell you if that happened in this draft or another one. But I can’t remember the last time I had a clearer purpose; I wanted you dead so badly it was primal, animal.”

“Then why am I slowly bleeding out, or is that the answer? Because this,” he grimaced as he raised his partially severed limb, “hurts, certainly, but we both know you could do so much worse. If you wanted. But that’s always been your problem, Fessuns- you didn’t. Even when you were trying for a Section 8, not that we can folks just for being crazy up here- we’re too civilized for that. But your heart’s never been in it, not even when your life was on the line. So if you’re trying to make me piss in my pampers you should have let Mai do the dirty work. She at least knows when to let her inmates run her asylum.”

“You’re trying to goad me,” Anita said. “Which is frustrating primarily because it exposes how easily manipulated you believe me to be. If I hadn’t already taken your hand- I told you not to go for that gun- I’d have to cut something else off to prove the point. But to answer the question at the heart of your manipulation, you’re alive because I am both seeing too many alternate realities and not enough depth. Killing you will either cause a genocide or prevent one- and as much as I deeply want you dead, that’s a hell of a margin for error.”

“Ah, so it isn’t poser Hannibal Lecter Anita, it’s indecisive Anita. Probably my least favorite, if I can be candid.”

“Maybe- and I’m just spitballing here because it feels like an erupting Mount Saint Helens is crowning through my forehead as we speak- but perhaps rather than set your dial to maximal dick, you could try telling me why I shouldn’t risk a genocide to murder you- because even with genocide as a possible unintended consequence it is delicious watching that blade slide in and out of your flesh. Almost pornographic, flipping between the drafts, where tiny variations in timing make the stabbing a few seconds sooner or later, it looks like it’s sliding in and out of you repeatedly.”

“I’m not going to beg,” he said proudly. “We did what we thought we had to. For all we knew the Russian experiments on weaponizing Breed were going to bear fruit, and people like you were the next nuclear bomb. I wished that weren’t true; every day I asked whatever god was listening to take that burden away from us. He wasn’t listening; I imagine you’re familiar enough with that. But we all of us did what duty and country demanded. Except some of us stuck it out. Worked the program- reformed from within. Not that I was always the reforming type; took me a while to understand the error of my ways. But this ain’t the facility you knew; here we deal with troubled kids, and trying to get them on a path to a normal life. I’m not so much in charge of the place as entombed here; I know where the bodies are buried, and have the right kind of background and clearances to keep a lid on what happened.”

“I don’t believe you…”

“Why would you? I was the program, as far as you and the other agents were concerned. I was your tormentor. But things change. People, too. Who was it, you thought let you slip the chain in Argentina? Did you think we couldn’t track you down? Or your friend out there, when she went missing in Afghanistan. You think we couldn’t have tracked either of you to the ends of the Earth? Hell, you think we didn’t? But with the both of you getting loose so close together, and the body counts you left in your wake- it helped me convince everybody else we’d been playing with old dynamite, gave me the leverage I needed to shutter the program.” He exhaled, and kicked out his foot, before piercing her with his eyes.

“I don’t blame you, understand? I’ve seen more war than any man ought to; done things that even I, at my most detached, was horrified by. I don’t think you get to live a life as bloody as mine, and die intact of old age.”

“Nothing to worry about there,” Anita said, anger still roiling in her voice, “since you’re no longer intact.”

He held up his stub. “I’m flipping you off, you just can’t tell.” “I might be the only one who could,” she said. “It wasn’t a clean slice in all of the drafts; in some of them the hand’s still hanging on by a tendon or two.”

The ICE agents were barely moving, and were more and more resembling snowmen. They were caked in frozen rain, with a light dusting of fresh snow sticking to the top of that and icicles hanging off of several of them. “You almost start to feel a little bad for them,” Tucker said, grinning. “I mean, we’re entering Valley Forge levels of pitiful, here.”

“I don’t,” Izel said coldly. “But maybe that’s because I can taste the racism. It’s like blood on the back of my teeth.”

“Sounds like you may need to floss more,” Drake said from behind them, startling Izel.

“The combination of fear and hatred coming off them… you see that toxic mix in rabid dogs, but it’s horrifying in a person- let alone a person who wants to abuse his power to hurt you.”

“How are we doing?” Drake asked.

“They’re about ready to break,” Tucker said. “And I don’t just mean the fact that some of them are so frozen that if they tripped and fell they’d shatter like a crystal vase.”

“He’s right. I think they’d have given up before now if they could figure out how to. So we’re going to give them an out.”

Tucker keyed a radio. “Bring in the heavies.” Drake heard the bus’s breaks from a few blocks over, then saw as it rounded the corner. It was filled with students he recognized from the campus.

“Our heaviest hitters,” Izel said. “The ones who could stand up to the punishment if it became a brawl.”

“Also the ones with the most bulletproof paperwork,” Tucker added. “It would sort of defeat the point if we accidentally got somebody deported.”  

The bus continued past them, and turned around in the cul-de-sac surrounded by the apartment complex the ICE agents were marching for. It stopped at an angle across the street, and students began to empty out of the bus. They formed a line, covering the road, the sidewalks, and any reasonable path towards the apartments. “That’s our cue,” Tucker said. “You want to-” Drake touched both of their arms, and they teleported to the front of the group.

“You look awful, Officer… Louie?” Tucker said, and peered at him a moment.

“It’s not spelled that way in China; it’s by no means the worst Romanization I’ve seen. Also, you’re in our way.”

“Really?” Tucker asked. “Because it kind of looks like air is in your way at this point. I’ve seen spinsters with walkers finishing a 10k with more spring in their steps.” This time the agent peered at Tucker. “My two queer great aunties; even into their 70s they were a couple of fitness buffs. But my point: about the only thing you could march successfully for right now would be a hot cocoa. As it happens, we at the school heard about your misfortunes, and raided our cafeteria to bring you some at your office. You weren’t there, but we heard through the grapevine you were headed this way. So we commandeered you a bus.” The students who had been standing in front of the bus’s door parted.

“I’m afraid we can’t throw in the towel just yet,” Louie said, stiffening. “I’ve heard reports that apartment complex is full of Breed that are illegally in this country.”

“Really?” Tucker asked. He pulled up his phone. “Because the school is very thorough about vetting our students’s paperwork, including student visas, and fully 84% of the residents of that complex are students at our school. I’ve just emailed you copies of all of their documentation, by the way.”

“How?” he asked. “Cell towers have been dark since this morning.”

“I’ve got four bars,” Tucker said, showing him the phone. Louie checked his phone, and saw a massive email waiting in his inbox. “Maybe your office is in a dead spot. Or maybe whatever happened has been fixed.”

“Maybe,” he said. He dialed through. “Hello, this is Agent Louie with ICE. I need to report an illegal gathering.” Izel opened her bag, and produced several sheets of paper, which Tucker handed to Louie. “It’s a protest?” Louie asked. “They paid the fee and have all the proper permits.” He hung up. “I don’t believe in coincidence,” he seethed.

“And if you could use your red hot rage to thaw out some of your comrades, maybe you’d be in a position to do something about it. Though I’d humbly suggest that isn’t the case.” Tucker raised his hand over his head and snapped his fingers. A student standing at each wheel lifted the bus over their heads, until it was suspended eight feet in the air. “I thought a lot about what I’d say, threats we could make. Like we could Roanoke you, disappear even the memory that there ever was an ICE office in Bellingham, wipe the memory of anyone who ever came looking and delete any record any of you ever existed. Then we’d have to track down your families, and wipe all their memories. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. And I think it’s already dawning on you the mistake you’ve made coming here today.” Tucker snapped again, and the bus was set gently back down.

“The bus holds forty eight; it took four to lift a school bus. Agent Louie, you jumped into the lions’ den here,” Tucker continued. “You thought you could handle what you were calling down- felt you could get away with violating the rights of some immigrant students without anyone ever being the wiser. You were wrong. We can let bygones be bygones. You don’t have to risk your life, and theirs,” Tucker led his eyes to his fellow agents, “over an error. But this isn’t happening like you wanted. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not so long as any of us are above ground to resist you. So friendly advice- and I promise it’s the last that you’ll hear from me- get on the bus. Go back to your office. You really don’t want to hear us roar.” Louie popped the button strap holding his sidearm in a shoulder holster. Tucker held up his hand for them to wait.

One of the ICE agents broke lines, and started towards the bus. As he put one foot on the first step, he turned back towards Louie. “Sorry,” he said with a shrug.

“You made him do that. Puppeted him.”

“Nope,” Tucker said. “I gave the agents you corralled into this a chance to do the right thing.” Two more crossed the line, and a third, and two more. “Sometimes that’s all it takes.” Louie flexed his hand over his pistol, before letting it fall empty to his side.

“You better not be lying about that hot chocolate,” he said, “or I’m coming back.”

“I’m not,” Tucker said. “It’s even still hot.” Louie got on, last, and the doors closed behind him.

“I don’t like this,” Izel said, as the bus pulled away. “They shouldn’t get to just walk away like this.”

“They’re not. The technopaths are going to ruin as many of their lives as possible. Just showing up for something like this means they can’t be trusted with the job they have. The few we can’t find dirt on we’ll watch. Maybe we’ll have to catfish them, maybe we just have to wait until they hit financial skids, and can use that to get their clearance yanked. But the men who marched here today aren’t getting off scot free, Izel. I’m just disappointed sling-shotting them into the sun, which would have been more satisfying, is probably wrong somehow.” “I’m disappointed about that, too, now,” Izel said, smiled and waved as the bus rolled away.

“I take it Anita won,” Rox said, raising an eyebrow at Mai.

“If by ‘won’ you mean shot me repeatedly through the spine, then yes,” Mai said, leaned against a file cabinet to try to stay upright.

“I thought you could heal.”

“I am,” Mai said. “Minute ago I couldn’t wiggle my toes. 90 seconds ago I couldn’t breathe. Two minutes ago I was bleeding out. You have any idea how difficult it is regrowing nerve tissue while you’re going into shock and trying to pass out from blood loss?” Rox helped her stand, and leaned her against a nearby desk.

“So why’d she shoot you?”

“Well, if she’d stuck around I might have assumed it was to stop me from doing something I’d regret. Since she locked herself on the other side of that door, other thoughts spring to mind.”

“She’s going to kill Garrity.”

“That may be the best case scenario,” Mai said, and Rox frowned. “When we both used to work here, she developed a… habit. Started carving up targets like a Christmas goose- but one that definitely slept with your sister and diddled your favorite pet. We all thought she was losing her mind, which apparently was not as big a liability as you’d assume given the fucked up nature of what we were being tasked with. I thought it was only a matter of time before one of us was going to have to put her down, frankly, until a mission in Kabul. We were separated from the rest of our team, and our first evac got shot down. So we were hunkered for days while they figured out alternate arrangements. I don’t know if it was sleep deprivation, lack of food and water, or if she just needed to talk… but she broke down and told me. She was trying to get discharged. She thought if she was awful enough, scary enough, that they’d have to bounce her from the program. I… wasn’t terribly supportive of her decision.”

“You fought.”

“Probably would have been to the death, but she was sharper then, in a fight; she could counter almost any move you made, in real time.  And you could read the betrayal on her face… she wanted me to understand, and support her, and instead- I tried to kill her. She kept me alive while we waited for evac. Alive, but only just. At the time it felt like the opposite of mercy; but in retrospect I think maybe she was trying to be kind.”

“So how did you still blame her after all of that?”

“Because my memory is a pile of moldering Swiss cheese. Some days I barely remember me. And because, on some level, I think I felt betrayed. Because she could have looped me into her plan, and together we might have been able to do something about it. But instead she was willing to abandon me- really the rest of us, to this hell. I’m not saying it’s rational, but I promise you, this… program didn’t leave you the faculties to be rational. The intentionally undermined our rationality, so we’d substitute their judgment for our own.”   

Rox tried the locked door, and then leaned against the wall beside it with a sigh. As she did, she heard a jingling in her jacket pocket. She removed the keys. “Really?” Mai asked.

“Really,” Rox said, and the first key she tried opened the door. Inside was an office, decorated with full military pomp. The wall behind the desk was covered in blood spray, and laying on the floor was a severed hand.

“I remember him being taller,” Mai said. “I’ll tell you he won’t last long with that kind of blood loss.”

Rox found a panel similar to the blast doors in the lobby in the rear of the room. “This is going to take a little more doing.”

“Hey, without your luck, we’d have been separated from them by two doors. We just to work the problem.” A gunshot rang out from inside the panic room. “And hope she doesn’t kill him before we can get in there.”

Rox stopped, and gave her a questioning look. “But does it really matter? Even if he spent the last decade planting trees, building a habitat for humanity and club-proofing baby seals… I don’t think he could make up for everything he’d done. So… who cares if she shoots him? I know I’m supposed to, but even I really don’t.”

“I’m not worried about him,” Mai said. “I’m telling you he drove both of us nearly past the breaking point. I would throw a parade if that son of a bitch died. But I’m worried about Anita- about what facing down this evil alone might do to her. You’ve seen what living with that past has done to her. I’m not sure she can survive revisiting it.”

“Don’t react,” Kara said flatly. Most of the bush they were standing behind wasn’t actually there. It was a fabrication she embroidered with telepathy to make them more difficult to spot from the road.

“Hi,” Drake said, appearing behind them.

“Did a dude just appear behind us, or am I stressed out enough I’m hallucinating?” Simon asked.

“He’s real. His name’s Drake. Drake, Simon- Simon, Drake. He teleports, and he’s our ride out of here if we draw too much attention.”

“Uh, she’s right about that,” Drake said nervously. “And I’m going to assume that this is an extenuating enough circumstance that I shouldn’t be irked by you rifling through my head.”

Kara cracked her knuckles, smiling wickedly, “Rifling, you say…”

“Not a challenge,” he said.

“I was kidding. And I knew you’d feel that way, and agreed. Normally it’s very uncool to tell someone what’s in somebody else’s head.”

“I thought telepaths didn’t read thoughts as a matter of politeness,” Drake said.

“For those who can control it, that’s true. But there’s no such thing as a typical telepath. We’re all different, some wildly so. For me, not hearing thoughts is, well, like trying not to hear my roommate with her vibrator. I mean, I try to tune it out, but I can’t not hear. Believe me I’ve tried. I put in industrial grade hearing protection, under noise cancelling headphones. With death metal on. I don’t even like death metal. Still, any moment that isn’t filled with percussion and screamed German profanity I can hear her…”

“The way you describe it I think I hear it.”

“Yeah, uh…” she blushed, “I was oversharing. Some telepaths do that, too. It’s subtle, with me; you might not even know it, even now, but I was likely broadcasting elements of the experience directly into your mind.”

“You’re sure you’re not just a vivid storyteller?” Drake asked.  

“She isn’t,” Simon said, and she punched him in the meat of his upper arm. “Ow. I mean, that isn’t it. We tried it, once. Put me in her noise-cancelling headpones. I couldn’t hear a word she was saying- but I could still see what she was describing. She hit me, then, too.”

“You were being a perv,” she protested.

“You told the pervy story. Biology was why I reacted the way I did.”

“No more details, or I’m going to hit you, too,” Drake said.

“It can be mildly embarrassing for me,” Kara redirected. “Some of us, though, especially telepaths on the spectrum- some of them can’t filter it out. They have to learn other coping techniques, like meditating. It is not easy meditating while talking to someone.”

“I had no idea.”

“Some telepaths don’t like to talk about it. Some don’t feel it’s their place to. Personally, I don’t like the idea of contributing to a stigma. We’ve all had issues with our abilities.” Drake was about to deny, but stopped himself. “You want to tell him, or should I?”

Drake rolled his eyes. “I went through a phase, in high school. I’d seen just enough movies to be titillated about the girl’s locker room, but wasn’t yet mature enough to realize it was just a room filled with stinky girls pressed too close together- and pretty much not in a hot way.”

“That’s accurate,” Kara said.

“Anyway, if I wasn’t careful, and let the fantasy become too active in my brain… I’d accidentally teleport there. I nearly got expelled, because it kept happening. The only reason I didn’t was the administration couldn’t figure out how I did it- and just as crucially, couldn’t prove that I wasn’t being shoved in by bullies.”

“Yeah,” Simon said. “Gave myself frostbite one of the places you least want frostbite.” Kara laughed.

“I’m not sure it’s funny,” Drake said seriously.

“It gets funnier,” she said, continuing.

“Dad was on a business trip. So I had to tell my mom to take me to the emergency room. Where my aunt worked as a nurse, and was inexplicably working a weekend shift. And my grandmother met her for lunch. They were surprisingly mean about it.”

“To be fair,” Kara said, stifling still more laughter, “they waited to be mean until they were sure you hadn’t done any permanent damage. At which point they became truly savage- like the Geneva Conventions against torture were violated- and I’m not sure I’m exaggerating for comedic effect.”

“She is not. It was a weird way to learn that the matriarchs in my family were Olympic-level practitioners of cool, cruel, dry wit.”

“You seem more zen about this than… I can understand,” Drake said.

“Thankfully, I got my dad’s disaffected nature. I was laughing with them by the end of it. But it was a trial by fire.”

“Speaking of,” Kara said, nodding in the direction of the sound of boots.    

“You did that on purpose,” Drake said. “Distracting us.”

“Didn’t take a psychic to see we were all a little too tense; and it didn’t take telepathy to know a little humor would puncture that tension. But you’re up, Si.”

He sighed deeply, and as he exhaled, Drake could feel the air get colder. “Jeez,” he said, shivering. Drake noticed patches of frost in the street spider-webbing, growing wider and denser as they swallowed up moisture from the air.

“And they just want snow?” Simon asked, closing his eyes as he concentrated.

“Snow to start. The next corner is going to hit them with freezing rain.”

“So I’m trying to drop their temperatures- at least of their clothes- get them as close to freezing as possible to supercool the rain as it hits. That’s kind of evil. I love it.” He exhaled again, and this time Drake couldn’t stop shivering, even under his ski coat.

“I can feel the temperature drop when he does that,” he said.

“Not as much as they can,” Simon said, as the first of the ICE agents crested the hill. There were a few dozen of them, marching brokenly as the cold made it harder for them to move. “Believe it or not, you’re just feeling the ripples of cold I’m directing at them- they’re getting it full-on. One of the agents exhaled, and his breath crystalized in the air, and fell to the road, where it shattered.

“Shit,” Kara said. Drake saw it an instant after her. One of the agents was staring right at them, whispering to the agent next to him. “We need to get out of here. There’s a few seconds before they all notice us.”

“On it,” Drake said, putting a hand to each of their shoulders. An instant later and they were inside the student center back at the campus.

“Wow, that warm air,” Kara said, unzipping her jacket.

“They rotating you back in?” Drake asked.

“Not if they can help it. Since the name of the game is deniability, the idea was to never have them see the same person twice. You know, until you decided you should be on the front line their entire trek.”

“Yeah,” he said, squinting. “Maybe not the best time to call an audible.”

“No, I think you were right. Given the choice, I’d rather have to divide some of my attention masking you than worry about trying to get you to us in a hurry. One panicked, confused thought and the whole damn thing could fall apart. Plus, us telepaths are pretty good about reinforcing each other, even over a distance.” She smiled, pushing an image into his mind. It was a block and a half from where they’d been, looking through the eyes of another telepath. “You should go, before they’re in ‘view’ of the march. It’s always easier to hide someone who’s already there, than to try and intercept someone who just pops up out of thin air. And thanks for the help. We felt safer having you with us.”

“I did?” Simon asked.

“He has some trouble admitting it- even to himself; toxic masculinity’s a real bitch- but he did.” “Anytime,” Drake said, and disappeared.

Rox grabbed a white coat off a hook beside the door into the lobby. She heard the jangling of keys, and felt inside the pocket. There were moments, often lost amid the chaos, where it was good to be her.

Then she saw something, a picture, one she’d seen before. In the lobby. Behind the receptionist. She stared at his old face, his military buzzcut; his nameplate at the bottom of the frame seemed almost incidental: Garrity. That’s when it fell into place. He was in charge of their program, the one that had mutilated and traumatized Anita and Mai for years. One of them must have seen the picture, maybe both of them, and in that moment, decided to make a run for it. And now they were loose in this base, the three of them, rushing to reach Garrity or that poor kid first.

She closed her eyes and stared walking. She’d tried this once before, trying to let her ability guide her. She ended up bumping into several walls, ending up with a fat lip and a cut through her eyebrow. There was a car accident on her usual route; a car hit the coffee stand she stopped at for a mocha every morning. She could never tell if that was her ability saving her, or if it was her ability reaching out and killing so it looked like it had.

Right now she didn’t have a lot of choice, so she started walking.

With her eyes shut, she had plenty of space to focus on screwing up. They may not have been the most powerful Breed, but they were, between them, two of the most destructive.

She tried playing the moment over again in her mind. Had it been Mai who started the run for the door? Or was it Anita shooting out the camera? Or maybe they’d both been playing her from the beginning, using her luck and her connections to get them inside, where they had always planned to ditch her.

No. She rejected that. Whatever her faults, Rox’d spent too much time with Anita to think she would manipulate her like that. She must have chased Mai, using her ability to flip through drafts on the fly to try and figure out where the little murder machine was headed- and just as crucially, if there was any way to stop her if she managed to catch her.

She was walking for too long. Up inclines, and down winding, twisting turning descents. She never encountered a patrol, or so much as bumped into a wall. She was beginning to wonder if she’d somehow wandered into the gym and found the world’s smoothest treadmill when she realized she could hear breathing, and had the sensation of someone being close. There was someone there, low to the ground, but definitely absorbing ambient noise in a distinctly human shape. “Well?” a voice she recognized asked. “You going to open your eyes and help me?” she asked.

It was Mai.

“I don’t get why I’m here,” Drake said, shivering against the cold.

“In case one of ours gets spotted,” Izel said. “The meteoropaths have to be pretty close, along the route the ICE gestapo are takin, to keep the weather pattern relatively contained; if we froze the whole city we’d cause a lot of accidents- especially with that kind of a freak storm- no pun intended. But that means a certain degree of vulnerability. We’ve got them linked up with telepaths, who can push the agents away with some mental suggestions, but probably not if a whole group of them at once decide to pay attention.”

Drake frowned. “’Mind control’ is a misnomer,” Tucker explained. “Most of the time, in most senses of the word, we don’t really do that. It’s more about… influence, and misdirection. You get enough telepaths together, and you can force your will on someone. But the mind isn’t really designed for that sort of… flexibility. You push someone too hard and they’ll break. Maybe they just experience it as trauma- it is essentially a mental assault. But that’s kind of the best-case scenario. You can break entire thought processes, brain structures- you can lobotomize someone for all intents and purposes without trying if you aren’t cautious. So mostly we stick to a gentle push. Suggestion. Not dissimilar to hypnosis, really. Convincing someone that what you want from them is what they wanted to do in the first place.”

“Which isn’t to say telepathy isn’t one of the more scary powerful abilities out there,” Izel said. “I can link your memories such that your knees stop working every time you hear the word ‘purple.’ I can convince your neurons to link up in new ways- either to make you a lot dumber or a lot smarter.”

“But it’s a lot like programming, or maybe hacking,” Tucker interjected. “There are a lot of ways that the human brain takes shortcuts. Most of our minds and our memories are about linkages, connections. It’s functionally a whole different language. But once you learn to speak it, there’s a lot you can do with it.”

“But not always quickly,” Izel added.

“Look, over there!” Tucker pointed over Drake’s shoulder, and he turned to look. “See, trying to convince you to do that telepathically would require me to connect with some portion of you that would want to see something over there, then convince your mind that that something might be over there, and feed that suspicion until it was worth the effort to look.”

“I think I got it. Having telepaths run interference is like having a deflector shield- it’ll maybe save you from a little indirect attention, but not from a hail of gunfire.”

“Exactly.”

“I really hope there isn’t a hail of gunfire,” he said.

“Us, too. But you’re here, in part, to make sure that can’t become a possibility- or at least remove our people from the line of fire if it becomes one.”

“So I’m their exfiltration option. K.” He disappeared, and reappeared an instant later, sliding on a heavier coat. “Much better. I swear, I’m going to spend a week in a warm bath. And meteoropaths?”

“Nothing to do with meteors; well, a little, I guess,” Tucker said with a shrug. “It technically means they control things high in the atmosphere. Though I don’t know of anyone who controls both- it’s just a quirk of the language.”

“You two are central command, right?”

“Sure,” Tucker said.

“I should be at the front. Wherever they’re most likely to get spotted.”

“That will make them a lot easier to spot,” Izel said.

“Right. But if I’m there, then I can pull everybody ought quickly as possible. If I’m here… then we’ve got a whole other pair of brains involved in the decision tree, when seconds- even microseconds- may be the difference. Point me to the tip of the spear.” Tucker closed his eyes, and shared an image from the mind of the telepath nearest the approaching ICE line. “Got it,” he said, and was gone.

“We’re sure this is safe?” Izel asked, watching CCTV footage on her phone.

“The technopaths have got it locked down. Demi left the one camera alive, so we could see if- crap.”

Agents in riot gear started to pour out of the front of their office building. “It’s okay,” Izel said. “We knew it was a long shot we could dissuade them entirely- if only because their fragile egos wouldn’t be able to take loses so completely without at least a whimper. We’ve got plans in place for this… though…” agents continued to stream out of the building, “I don’t know if we accounted for quite so many of them. Damn. That’s a lot more brownshirts than I was expecting.”

“Yeah,” Tucker said solemnly. “There always seem to be too many of the worst kinds of people.”

“I don’t know,” Izel said. “It’s kind of clarifying. These aren’t just cogs in a racist machine. These are the hardcore- the ones who it isn’t enough they got to legally prosecute some dodgy cases against immigrants. They’re breaking the law, because their bigotry is that controlling. I mean, no Nazis marching through the streets is preferable. But if there have to be Nazis, I’d prefer them in the street. At least then we can march against them.”

“So…” Rox said, leaving the word to dangle.

“We’re going in,” Mai said.

“What she said,” Anita said, emerging from behind a bush.

“Why am I not surprised you were eavesdropping?” Rox asked.

“Something about the hyperaggressive, hypercompetent nearly unkillable death machine still having half a girl-boner for my early demise feels like it warrants a little TLC.”

“She does have a point.”

“Yeah. But never driven deep enough to pierce anything vital. Yet.”

“Fine,” Rox said. “But we do this my way, or not at all.”

“Because you could stop us?” Mai asked, bemused.

“Actually,” Anita said with a smile, “all she really has to do is stamp her foot and our own rotten luck will stop us.”

“Besides,” Rox soothed, “my way makes more sense. I get that the two of you are my elders- and I mean that in the you have my respect for all you’ve done and lived through meaning of the word. But I also know what this place put the both of you through. Given half a chance, one or both of you would blow the whole damn place up- maybe without even checking to make sure there aren’t others like the boy we’re here to find inside.”

“Shit,” Anita said. “I hadn’t even considered that.”

“I had,” Mai said coldly, and the both of them stared at her. “What? That’s why I decided against blowing the place up- unless or until we could make sure there aren’t going to be any unexpected casualties.”

“Point being,” Rox reasserted herself, “you two are compromised in a way I am not. So it makes sense for all of us to get on the same page now, and let me Jiminy Cricket you both through this. Sound fair?”

“Sure,” Anita said. “You do kind of look like Ukulele Ike in this lighting.”

“That’s probably preferable to you saying I look like a cricket.”

“Actually…”

“Mai?”

“No promises,” she said crisply. “You take point. I’ll try and keep things under wraps. But frankly… if we walk into an abattoir… I’m not sure how cool I can keep.” “Okay. Most important ground rule is this: we don’t kill anybody we don’t have to. Until we know exactly what’s going on here, we use minimum force necessary to do the job- and not an ounce more. If either of you can’t live with that, you might as well stay out here.”