The Handler Read online

  My eyebrows hiked up, and I was honestly surprised that Anna didn’t pull the trigger right then. “She’s a handler, Julian,” Anna said, low and tight.

  Hearing it out loud tugged something deep inside me. I had never met another handler. Did Serena see the same colorful ball of instincts at the back of my head? Handler was a term Anna and I used—no one else would know it—and her words were actually asking whether she should put a bullet in Serena’s brain or give her a chance to prove her worth as an ally.

  “A handler?” Serena’s voice was less sure now. “Is that what you call… what I do?” A black mist snaked through her mind. Maybe it unnerved her that we might know more about her than she knew herself. “Sorry, love,” she said to Anna, “about my little demonstration on you. Had to make a big entrance, show what I was capable of. You understand.”

  Anna didn’t look in an understanding mood.

  Serena’s gaze darted to the door. “I am terribly sorry about jacking your girlfriend, Julian. Not quite sure even how I did it. Her head is as hard as a rock.”

  So she hadn’t jacked through Anna’s mind barrier. My shoulders relaxed a little. “She’s my sister,” I said. “And we all have unusual abilities here.”

  Serena flinched. “I don’t suppose you can forgive my frightfully impolite entrance then, could you? I’m not used to people understanding my, shall we say, peculiarities. Frankly, it’s become quite tiresome, being a freak among freaks all the time.” Her green eyes sparkled with what could be unshed tears or possibly sardonic wit. I couldn’t be sure, but I was more than a little interested in exactly what her peculiarities were. If Serena was a handler like me, we could learn a lot from her, including things about my own abilities that I couldn’t find out any other way. She could be a tremendous asset.

  If she refrained from handling my sister again.

  I glanced at Anna, but she must have already seen the decision on my face. Her cheek muscle twitched, but she lowered her weapon.

  “I think we might have something to talk about after all.” I smiled at the clear relief that washed across Serena’s face.

  Serena refused to take the piece of dusty machinery I had just heaved off the grime-coated racks in the middle of the factory. The motor smelled of stale grease, and decades of rust had chewed into every seam.

  She crossed her arms. “I’m not a bloody pack mule.”

  The motor was a good twenty pounds and would probably crush the toes peeking out from her impractical shoes, if she dropped it. I was tempted to toss the motor to her for real, but instead just pretended. She jerked back, reflexively opening her arms. I placed the greasy motor into them, and she sunk under the weight of it, her expression transforming to horror.

  “See if you can find room over there.” I pointed to the shelving opposite us and turned to my own rack before she could see my smirk. Hundreds more boxes and spare parts needed to be cleared out or reclaimed, all left over supplies for the massive door stamping machines. She’d only just arrived, but I couldn’t afford to have people join the cause who weren’t willing to pitch in.

  I glanced over my shoulder. She wobbled in her red heels, searching for an open spot for her load. The metal rack screeched in protest when she dropped the motor onto it. Anna, in the kitchen area down at the end of the row, glanced up from rubbing down guns that she had already cleaned an hour ago. She was deliberately keeping her distance, outside my hundred-foot range, so I couldn’t get a read on her instincts, but even at that distance I could see the glare. I pretended not to notice.

  Serena stared at her oil-smudged hands, as if discovering an alien lifeform was taking over her body. I snagged another antique motor and carried it over, setting it gently on the rack in order to not draw more attention from Anna.

  I pulled a rag from my back pocket and handed it to Serena. “I’m fairly certain it will come off.” Only a valiant effort kept my smirk in check.

  She rubbed at the black smudges, but just managed to smear them across her palms. “I may have to reconsider joining your Clan, Julian, if all you want is a janitor to tidy up.”

  I folded my arms and leaned against the skeleton rib of the rack. “Oh, I have a lot more I want to accomplish than just cleaning up the place.” I gestured to the building around us. “This factory is hardened against conventional weapons by brick walls that are nearly a foot thick, and it’s large enough that the core of the building provides protection from the standard reach of most jackers. We’ll have to renovate the kitchen and bathroom facilities, but there’s plenty of space to organize and gather the large number of jackers we’ll need for the revolution.”

  “Revolution?” Her eyebrows lifted. “I thought you were building a Clan, not an army.”

  “There’s much more in the way of change coming, Serena.” I gentled my voice. This was most important: did she understand the stakes? “Revealing jackers to the mindreading world didn’t just make it difficult to hide anymore. It made it imperative that we don’t.” I studied the whirling mass of instincts at the back of her head, and a wisp of flight instinct writhed through the ball, like a vaporous snake. If she were a normal jacker, I could slip through and tap her conscious mind to read her thoughts—but I couldn’t handle something I didn’t understand.

  “What are you on about?” she asked. “Not that I’m interested in hiding, mind you.”

  I pushed off the rack, standing straight and focusing on her eyes instead of her mind. “What do you think will happen as more and more jackers come out of hiding?”

  A frown crinkled her forehead.

  “What will happen,” I asked, “when the mindreaders decide we’re not just a frightening possibility, lurking around the corner, hiding in the shadows, but a real threat?”

  “Well, they’re just mindreaders,” she said. “What can they do against us?”

  “The mind isn’t much of a weapon against a tank or a bomb, Serena, no matter how powerful that mind might be.”

  Her frown grew deeper and her instinctual mind writhed with black. I mentally reached out. Maybe I could get hold of that snake of fear and ease it away. Part of me wanted her not to be afraid, but more importantly, I needed to know if I could tame the wildness of her instincts. Control them. I’d never met someone before that I couldn’t…

  “Is that what your army’s about, then?” she asked. “Fighting the mindreaders in some kind of grand war? You’re an idealist. A revolutionary.”

  “Most definitely.” I grasped the black wisp and flipped it to sunshine yellow. Her face showed no change, just the indulgent smile of someone regarding a misguided, but well meaning, lunatic. Perhaps the flight instinct wasn’t strong enough to have the manipulation cause a visible effect. At least I could handle the bits that I recognized. “We’re not freaks, Serena. And we’re not an anomaly. We’re destined to be the next step in the evolution of mankind, but only if we fight to survive.”

  Her smirk grew stronger. “I suppose there are worse Clans to join, than ones destined to rule the world.”

  I looked away from the gleam in her eye and studied the rack behind her. Now it was clear. Serena was a mercenary, the kind who was willing to sign up for whatever cause put her on the winning team. I had hoped for more, for someone who would actually believe in the cause we were fighting. I wasn’t sure if it could truly work any other way.

  “When we’re done cleaning up, we’ll have enough room to house a good sized Clan,” I said. “But it remains to be seen whether you’ll be joining us.”

  Her smile evaporated. She brushed a dangling red lock of hair out of her eyes, leaving a trail of gritty machine grease behind on her forehead. When she wasn’t screaming in terror or leering at me, she was actually attractive. I resisted the urge to wipe away the smudge.

  She glanced down the row. “I thought you had decided to keep me on, once your sister declined to shoot me.”

  Anna was still fastidiously rubbing down her pistol with machine oil and ignoring us. “You could
have stopped her, like you did the first time,” I said quietly to Serena. “Why didn’t you?”

  She ground more grease spots into her skin, turning the lily white to pale gray. “I could have,” she said. “At least, I think so. But that frightful talent of yours meant I couldn’t control you, and that was the heart of it. She was clearly important to you, and controlling her wouldn’t have gained me any points. A gamble on my part.” She smiled up at me. “Must have paid off, if I’m still here.”

  “Yes, you’re still here.” I returned her smile. “Because I’d like to know more about what you can do.”

  “Well, you seem to already know,” she said. “Called it a handler, I believe.”

  I waved the term away, not ready to reveal anything. “I’d like to hear it from you. How does it work? Could you reach Anna now, if you chose to?”

  Serena squirmed, shifted from foot to foot, examined the machinery next to us, and took a long moment before shoving the rag into my chest. I caught it before it dropped to the floor, and thought she might be storming out next, but instead she spoke. “No, your sister is safely out of my range.” She acted as if I had mentally tortured the words out of her one at a time.

  “And you didn’t jack into her head when you controlled her?”

  “No.” She studied her hands again, now hopelessly marred with grit and oil.

  “Do you normally push through a person’s mindfield barrier first?”

  “Mindfield barrier?” She smiled and shifted a little closer. “You have fancy names for all these things, don’t you, pet?”

  “Please answer the question.”

  She pouted and studied the motor next to her. “Yes, I suppose it’s a barrier. Feels like a slushy muck, not exactly the most pleasant experience.”

  I didn’t feel anything like muck when I reached into people’s minds. Anna and my parents said that, for them, mind barriers came both hard and soft. But for me, there was nothing that blocked me from accessing the primal parts of their brains. And it wasn’t so much a matter of searching, as seeing with my mind and understanding in order to control it.

  “Once inside,” I said, “do you search for a particular part of the mind, in order to manipulate it?”

  “No.” She shifted feet and let out a tight sigh, like I was pulling the words out of her again. I balled up the oily rag and dropped it on the rack, waiting for a better answer.

  She watched me, hesitated, then finally said, “I don’t spend any more time in the muck than necessary to get the job done. I just jack in, wish for them to behave differently, and then they do.”

  Serena seemed to manipulate instincts intuitively, instead of directly like I did. Which meant she wasn’t truly a handler, or at least not like me. That created a hollow feeling in my stomach that I tried to ignore.

  “What did your old Clan think about that?”

  Her shoulders hunched up. “They weren’t quite as understanding as you, love,” she said. “Tossed me out on my ear, actually, because I couldn’t quite control it. See, I can make anyone, even your sister, with her head like a bank vault, into my best friend or someone else’s worst enemy. I don’t know how, precisely, and it doesn’t always go the way I plan. Sometimes… something goes wrong. And I think, did I do that? Did I really turn him into a monster that would be capable of…” A black cloud of fear instinct swallowed half of the color churning through her mind.

  “What happened?” I asked softly.

  She blinked several times, like she was holding back tears. “I was having an argument with the Clan leader’s brother, and he got a bit cheeky with me. Physical, actually.”

  The muscles in my shoulders tensed. “Did he hurt you?”

  “I’m fairly sure that was the intention.” She shuddered. “I couldn’t help myself, I had to stop him. And then something went wrong. He turned on a younger jacker. By the time the others stopped him, there wasn’t much left of the poor boy’s mind. There was nothing I could do—once it started, I couldn’t stop it. It was like I had unleashed something horrible inside him…”

  She peered up at me, eyes shining. I put a hand on her shoulder, feeling it quake underneath her thin t-shirt. A jacking skill as powerful as Serena’s needed to be mastered, simply to keep anyone else from being hurt. I mentally reached out to embrace the inky cloud of fear that had spread through her normally tumultuous mind.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We can learn to control it together.” I exhaled slowly, focusing on wrestling that black instinct back into the depths of her mind and bringing on a flood of peaceful yellow, like the sun breaking through storm clouds. Her face brightened with it, and before I realized what she was doing, she had pulled my face down into a kiss.

  The shock of it washed through me, along with a heated breeze from the purple tentacles of her mating instinct. Her lips pressed hard into mine. I didn’t stop her, but my lips barely kept up with hers. It had been so long since I had kissed anyone—mindreaders never held any interest for me, and the icy bath of my instinctual defenses kept most female jackers away. There had been one girl, before I came into my ability, but she never suspected what I would become. Serena leaned into me, seeking to deepen our kiss.

  I pulled back.

  Her cheeks were flushed, her lips tinged pink with our kiss, and her eyes wide with expectation. It was completely the wrong thing to say at the moment, but I said it anyway.

  “I think you should stay with us for a while.”

  Her smile told me that was just what she wanted to hear.

  I stood at the kitchen sink, working the grease stains off my hands while trying to keep the ice-cold water from splashing my collared shirt and dress pants. The formal attire seemed more appropriate for greeting our first recruit than my earlier dirt-smudged black t-shirt and jeans. Although I supposed this was our second recruit, now that I had officially invited Serena to join us.

  Serena was busy clearing racks in the far reaches of the factory, safe from the possibility of future kisses. The more I thought about it, the more kissing Serena seemed like an error in judgment. Playing favorites or getting personally involved with recruits would only sabotage my efforts to build a united coalition of jackers. I would be more careful in the future.

  Thankfully, Anna had been too busy cleaning her guns to notice the kiss. She had finished her superfluous cleaning, but several weapons were still laid out on the table.

  “You might want to put those away,” I said. “Don’t want to scare off the recruits before they’re even in the door.”

  “They should know what they’re getting into,” she said flatly, eyeing her guns. Her protective instinct flared again. Maybe she had seen Serena and me after all.

  Heat climbed up my neck. “Things aren’t always what they appear to be.”

  She rubbed her temples with both hands then looked up at me. “Just tell me you didn’t promise her anything.”

  Helping Serena learn to control her ability wasn’t so much a promise as an offer. And a necessity, if she was to stay with us. “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Anna’s shoulders relaxed. A soft knock at the door drew both our attention, but barely, like it was a tentative plea. I noted the time on the screen perched on the kitchen counter.

  “I believe our recruit is here.”

  “Maybe you should answer the door this time,” Anna said.

  I grinned and left her to stow her weapons, mentally reaching through the door before I arrived. The instinctual mind of our guest boiled red and hot, like Anna’s standard state of anger, and I hesitated with my hand on the door latch. I had only contacted this jacker on private message once; he had been referred by Henry, an older friend of the family who still ran the secret laboratory in my parents’ north shore estate. The recruit was a volunteer for one of Henry’s testing trials, which usually meant a jacker on hard times or thrown out by their Clan. Not typically someone who played well with others.

  But I trusted Henry more than most people on th
e planet.

  I took a breath and opened the door, letting in a blast of dry winter air. My recruit was a couple of years older than me, with dark brown skin, black curly hair, and even darker, almost fathomless eyes. His face was stoic, showing none of the raging aggression that churned underneath it.

  “Sasha, I presume?” I asked.

  “And you appear to be Julian.” His voice immediately softened, becoming almost apologetic. “Henry showed me your picture.” Then his eyes narrowed at my crisp, high-collared shirt.

  “I am indeed.” I stepped aside. “Won’t you come in?”

  Sasha hesitated, eyeing the cavernous and dusty interior of the factory, his body held stiff. I slipped through the angry red mist of his mind to read his thoughts. Most jackers couldn’t sense me, going in through the mind’s back door, so to speak, and I hoped Sasha would be the same. He looked like a powder keg about to go off, and I didn’t want to inadvertently light the fuse.

  Why is he so dressed up? Sasha’s thoughts jittered between staying and running. Maybe Henry was lying. This isn’t worth the risk…

  “Or,” I said, trying to keep him from bolting, “if you’d like, we could talk outside.” The street was empty. A plastic bottle tumbled lonely and hollow down the sidewalk, flashing cold winks of afternoon sun. Sasha pulled his gray trench coat tighter around his neck.

  “Inside will be fine.” He stepped past me, enough that I could close the door behind him, but then stopped. Anna watched Sasha with undisguised suspicion. The dart guns were still on the table.

  He turned back to me. “Look, maybe this was a mistake—”

  “You’re not in any danger here, Mr…”

  He ignored me, his gaze darting about the room but finding only Anna and me. Serena must have wandered off or possibly lain down to rest from her exertion in tidying up. The tension in Sasha’s shoulders ratcheted up until he was hunched over, like an old man. He edged closer and dropped his voice. “Did Henry tell you about me?”

  I nodded, wondering why we were whispering. “He said that you had an unusual ability. He didn’t specify what it was.” Which wasn’t entirely true. Henry said Sasha could do something extraordinary with erasing memories, but I wanted to hear it from Sasha himself.