The Handler Read online

  (a Mindjack Origins short story)

  Susan Kaye Quinn

  Text copyright © 2012 by Susan Kaye Quinn

  August 2012 Edition

  All rights reserved.

  www.susankayequinn.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. For information visit www.mindjacktrilogy.com

  Cover by D. Robert Pease

  www.WalkingStickBooks.com

  SHORT NOVELLA

  The Handler is a short novella in the Mindjack Origins series, which are companion stories to the Mindjack Trilogy. The Handler is told from Julian’s point of view and takes place in the time period between Open Minds and Closed Hearts. It contains (minor) spoilers for those two novels.

  Recommended Reading Order

  Mind Games

  Open Minds

  Closed Hearts

  The Handler

  The Scribe

  Summary: The first recruit in Julian Navarro’s mindjacker revolution threatens to derail his plans to ensure jacker freedom in a mindreading world.

  Century-old dust coated the portable news screen in my hands, as if this crumbling, abandoned factory could keep the future from coming by choking it with the past. I brushed away the grit and sunk into a couch whose spine had long been broken, only to puff up another musty cloud. I cleared the screen again, then mentally nudged the tru-cast recording on it to play. This was at least the twentieth time I’d replayed it. Maybe the thirtieth. I’d lost count.

  The image showed two FBI agents, both mindjackers, in a scene so familiar I had memorized every detail: the agents’ black guns pointed at the camera, glinting from the lobby’s plasma lights; the mindreaders huddled by the receptionist’s desk, trying to keep out of the showdown; even the janitor frozen in his window cleaning at the hospital gift shop, staring at the soon-to-be-famous sixteen-year-old girl wielding the camera phone like a weapon.

  At least that’s how I imagined her holding it—maybe because I was inclined to think of everything as a weapon these days. But my imagination would have to suffice, not having been one of the jackers present, on either side of the camera. In fact, I had no idea that Kira Moore was about to reveal the hidden mindjackers of the world until I saw it on the morning tru-cast two weeks ago, along with the rest of the nation.

  “It’s like the old days when the first readers were discovered,” Kira was saying. She meant the first mindreaders, long before they became the dominant species on the planet and took over everything, as dominant species tend to do. “What did we do?” she asked. “We put them in prison. We tortured them with experiments. Well, we’re doing it again, to these kids, today.”

  The camera phone swept around, the girl’s face dominating the screen and making my heart pound each time I saw it. Not just because I was male and she was undeniably pretty—it was more than that. Her eyes burned electric blue, on fire with a revolutionary fervor. Her pale skin flushed a feverish pink only at the hollows of her cheeks. Was it fear or anger, or the adrenaline rush of the moment? Or was it her instinctual protectiveness of the children sprawled on the floor behind her? She was just a couple of years younger than me, but her youth seemed timeless, radiating an almost otherworldly innocence and determination. I would have given anything to have been there at that moment, dipping into her mind and reading the passions that drove her to this singularly brave act.

  On the screen, she sucked in an audible breath, as if pulling herself up to her full angel-wrath. “My name’s Kira Moore, and I’m just like them. I was kidnapped—”

  The screen went blank.

  “Hey!” My protest bounced off the manufacturing equipment that stood silent and still along the cavernous factory walls. I darted a cold look to my twin sister Anna, working at a nearby wooden table pitted and scarred by a thousand everyday uses. I could mentally flip the tru-cast on again, but I would lose in a mental nudge match over the screen. “I was just getting to the good part.”

  “Julian, you need to stop watching that girl and focus on our work.” Anna’s stare underlined her words. My sister had the same dark-haired Latin beauty of our mother, but like our father, her icy blue-eyed glare could freeze the strongest jackers. Maybe because he taught her to shoot more than just looks. Anna picked up one of the half-assembled weapons spread before her and rubbed an oiled cloth over it with strong, practiced strokes.

  Anna could glare at me all she liked, but I could see the turbulent, protective instinct that roiled at the back of her skull. Like every instinct, it was a relic from our reptilian ancestors, hidden in our DNA until it sprung forth, an invisible compulsion that ruled our actions. The cool, misty waves of Anna’s strong, protective instinct usually crowded out all the others, but this time a wisp of rosy maternal instinct also curled at the edges.

  I sighed. I could change Anna’s instincts, mentally handle them into something not quite so endearing, but manipulating my sister wasn’t just wrong, it was slightly dangerous, given her handiness with a gun and general impatience with me. I could handle that out of her too, but eventually she would make me pay for it. Still, I wished Anna’s protectiveness and attempts to replace our dead parents wasn’t quite so… obvious.

  It would make it easier to remain angry with her.

  “That girl,” I said, putting some arch in my voice, just to needle her, “was the one who thrust our revolution into the light. Or would you rather still be working in secret? Hiding and pretending to simply be mindreaders?”

  Anna hurled my insult back with a sharp glare that found its mark as surely as the black knives she routinely embedded in the factory walls.

  I softened my tone. “All I’m saying is that Kira did us a tremendous favor. She changed everything. And, in the process, made our lovely new home possible.” I gestured grandly to the cobwebbed cabinets of the makeshift kitchen area. Anna had recently cleared them of chipped plates and petrified pests to make room for her weapons: several small caliber pistols, a couple of scoped rifles, and an impressive assortment of electric devices. My flip answer didn’t appease her for my slacking in the cleaning-and-arsenal-stocking department, but I knew the revolution wouldn’t be won with guns alone. In fact, I wished we didn’t need Anna’s arsenal at all. We needed to win hearts to our cause with words, not weapons. Starting with the very first recruits I was currently seeking.

  So I tried the truth instead.

  “Kira’s accomplished more with one act than we could have achieved with an armory packed with weapons,” I said. “She’s just the kind of person we could use in the cause.”

  I wished, for the hundredth time, that I could read my sister’s thoughts. Normally, I could slip in through the instinctual minds of readers and jackers alike, but Anna’s thoughts were locked tight behind an impervious barrier. Not that reading her face was particularly difficult, especially when her blue protective instinct shifted abruptly to the red, smoking aggression that normally wrapped around her head.

  “Kira is unpredictable and reckless,” Anna said. “Who goes in to rescue a bunch of changelings with nothing but a pistol and no apparent backup plan? From what I hear, she left far more changelings behind in Agent Kestrel’s grasp than she’s ever rescued. That makes her untrustworthy and dangerous as well.” Anna pushed up from the table, grabbed a rag from the counter, and scrubbed at the cabinets, clearing away decades of grit and the earnest work of dozens of spiders. She kept her back to me, like there was nothing more to discuss, but her red-hot fighting instinct, swirling at the back of her mind, gave her away.

  FBI Agent Kestrel was the first target of our revolution, b
ut I felt—I knew—that Kira Moore was meant to join us, despite her mysterious disappearance after the rescue. Kestrel was our enemy, and Kira was our friend. It was important to know the difference: the fight ahead would be worse if we cast aside the people who knew how to win it.

  I heaved up from the depths of the decrepit couch. “You should stop listening to rumors on the chat-casts.” I placed the still-blank screen on the kitchen table next to my sister’s partially assembled guns. “You know, only half of what you hear on the casts is true…”

  “And the other half are twisted lies. The trick is to know which half will kill you.” Anna finished our father’s favorite admonishment with the same look of fervent warning he always wore. “Don’t forget that part, Julian.”

  I peered over her shoulder at the dust-draped cabinet. “I think you missed a spot.”

  She glowered. I smirked. We called it a draw, as we usually did.

  She resumed her cleaning, and I peered down the vast middle of the factory floor. Dust motes danced in the forked streams of light from the high windows. Racks stretched to the ceiling, cluttered with parts for machines that stopped working long ago. It was a warehouse of the past, guarded by white, concrete columns and overseen by the unblinking eyes of plasma lights dangling overhead. Once transformed and forced into the future, it would be large enough to sleep a small army. More jackers were trickling into this nether region of Chicago New Metro every day, but they were forming the same lawless Clans that had fought each other for years. Bringing them together would take more than simply clearing out an abandoned door factory. Our mission was to liberate jackers, not fight them, but we would have to earn the respect necessary to lead them forward.

  It’s your words, not your ability, that will encourage others to follow you.

  My mother’s words were still fresh, whispered in her lab at the University of Chicago, where my parents’ neuroscience research covered for the real work they did: preparing for the revolution. My childhood was non-stop training for the day when jackers would fight to be free—when we would become the dominant species. When I would fulfill the mission they had entrusted to me.

  Their lives, all their work, would be meaningless if we failed.

  To bring the Clans together, we needed a coalition of strength, a core group of jackers with extraordinary abilities who could move the revolution forward. Kira was the prototype, the ideal kind of jacker that we needed to recruit. The chat-cast chatter said she possessed unusual abilities, like my sister and me. More importantly, a revolutionary spirit seemed to animate her. She single-handedly took on the entire system with little more than her words and a camera phone, having never fired a shot. We needed someone like her to replace what we lost when the accident claimed my parents’ lives. In the end, they had given us every tool to fulfill their vision of the future, save one: their presence, fighting by our side, when the time came.

  I strode toward the center racks, determined to get the transformation under way, when the sound of pounding at the door stopped me.

  “Expecting anyone?” Anna asked, pulling a dart gun out of a cabinet drawer. We had only recently fixed the obsolete punch-code lock that held the front door shut.

  “I have a recruit coming today,” I said, “but not until this afternoon.” While handling instincts was a highly unusual and useful skill, I was deficient in the normal mindjacker abilities that whoever was pounding on the door would expect. And I doubted they just wanted to talk. “Perhaps you should answer the door.”

  Anna pointed her gun at the metal door, no doubt reaching out to mentally surge against the mindfield of the person outside. Anyone trying to jack Anna in return wouldn’t get past her mind’s barrier, but if they tried, they stood a good chance of being jacked or shot. People quickly learned not to mess with my sister.

  After a moment, a broad, unnatural smile sprung to life on Anna’s face. “We have a visitor!” The gun clattered when she dropped it on the counter, and she practically sprinted to the door. I stared open-mouthed after her—Anna was never giddy, even when she was a five-year-old girl on Christmas morning. She was born serious. But her instinctual mind had warmed to the sunshine yellow of unfettered happiness as she skipped toward the door.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  I reached beyond the door just as Anna threw it open, gushing, “Welcome!” to the woman who stood outside. She was young, and her long red hair writhed in the wintery breeze, each wisp seeming to undulate on its own. The woman’s mind jumbled flashes of color in a strobe-like effect that I couldn’t quite grasp. I tried to handle Anna’s placid yellow instinct into something a little more alarmed about the unknown jacker striding past her, but it was somehow locked. Had the woman jacked through Anna’s impenetrable mind barrier or was she just an extremely powerful handler? The intruder’s gaze roamed the dimly lit factory and sparse furnishings until she found me, hovering at the edge of the kitchen.

  Then she screamed, loud and raw, and dropped to her knees, a look of pure terror twisting her pale face and pinching her eyes shut.

  That was the normal reaction people had when trying to jack me, so I wasn’t surprised. My instinctual barrier protected my mind by digging into the primal part of theirs to conjure every soul-sucking horror they’d ever envisioned. At least, that was what people had told me after it happened. I never felt a thing.

  While her red nails clawed at images only she could see, I tried to make sense of her. Instead of the pitch black, chilly blanket of fear that my defenses normally invoked, her mind was a riot of color, some I didn’t even recognize, seething like an animal barely contained by its cage. Black tendrils twisted through the misty kaleidoscope of colors, mesmerizing me for a moment. Then they dissipated, and she climbed to her feet, an impossible grin spreading across her face. She had recoverd far too quickly from an encounter with her worst nightmares.

  A chill raced up my back, and I reflexively tried to handle the roiling mess that was her mind, but I couldn’t understand it, much less manipulate it. That had never happened before. My mouth ran dry, and I eyed Anna’s discarded dart gun as the woman strode toward me. I could probably take her in a fistfight, but I wasn’t sure what else she could do. My heart thudded in my ears.

  “You must be Julian,” she said in a crisp British accent. She slowed her approach, bit her lip, and raked her green eyes across the length of my body. “I must say I’m not disappointed.” The mixed signals were doing a dance on my brain. Trying not to show the tension rippling through my body, I casually picked up Anna’s dart gun and let my hand fall to my side, the gun’s barrel pointing at the floor.

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” I said. “And you are?” Grayish flight instinct streaked through the throbbing colors of her mind, but I couldn’t get hold of it. Whatever the woman’s ability, she had managed to get into my headquarters with little more than a saunter. I would rather recruit her than shoot her, but if she was manipulating Anna’s mind from the inside, shooting might be my only option.

  “My name’s Serena.” She gave a quick glance to the weapon in my hand, and her sultry smile widened into one of pure excitement. “You’re not planning on using that on me, are you, love?” The gun certainly didn’t frighten her. Instead, she almost seemed to want me to shoot her. A twisted wraith of red and black—aggression and fear—zoomed across the surface of her mind and was gone before I had time to think about what that meant.

  I kept the gun pointed at the floor. “Do I need to shoot you? Or will you release Anna from whatever hold you’ve put on her, if I ask nicely?”

  She took a half step closer, dropping her voice. “Oh my, Julian.” I couldn’t help but feel the heat from her surge of deep purplish mating instinct. “I would do just about anything, if you asked nicely.”

  I frowned and leaned away from her. Anna blinked several times, then glared at us from the doorway, her creepy smile gone. I waved with the hand that held the gun, letting her know I had things under control. Mayb
e.

  Serena stepped closer, forcing me against the cabinet, then rocked back as I leveled the gun at her waist. “You’re just as dangerous as they say, Julian.” Her grin tipped higher in one corner. “And quite easy on the eyes as well. How lucky for me, since I’ve come to join your merry band of jackers.”

  “And why would that be?” Word must be getting out that we were looking, but I didn’t expect jackers to break in just to sign up.

  “You’ve got quite a reputation going already, love,” she said. “There’s chatter all over the casts about a new jacker who can strike terror into your soul without even jacking into your mind. If anything, the rumors don’t do you justice. That’s a wicked talent you have, scaring the pants off anyone who dares to touch your mind. And it so happens that I’m between Clans at the moment.” Her offer came with an arched eyebrow, suggesting it included more than just joining my Clan. She was early twenties, and her tight fitting, tailored pants, teetering heels, and snug t-shirt showed off her body in a way that seemed as calculated as every other move she was making.

  I kept the gun pointed at her. “It didn’t slow you down much.”

  She shrugged. Anna came up fast behind her, yanked a gun from a cabinet drawer, and pointed it at Serena’s head. The gun was a small caliber pistol, fully loaded, if I knew my sister. Serena didn’t flinch. As aggressive as this woman was, she was definitely unusual—and unusual was what we were looking for, even if it came tromping through the door uninvited.

  I nodded to my sister to get her to stand down. She didn’t move. “What talent do you have that you can disarm Anna here, when most jackers can’t even get into her head?” Including me, I didn’t say. The idea of her jacking Anna made me queasy.

  “Oh?” Serena threw a fake surprised look to Anna whose gun barrel would make a neat hole in Serena’s forehead if she decided to pull the trigger. “Are you not normally that easy to manipulate?”