Free Souls (Book Three of the Mindjack Trilogy) Read online

  I had no idea what to do with that.

  The feel of his lips was still imprinted on mine, but the hole in my heart didn’t have room for those kinds of feelings. It simply swallowed them like a black hole of emotion, one that I fed constantly with ops and training and anything that would dull the aching. But that hadn’t stopped me from kissing Julian back like… like I was hungry for it. Beyond hungry. Starving. Was it still that instinctual love, the one he had planted so long ago, that made me respond without thinking?

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it was real, or fake, or what—it was all tangled up in my head. More importantly, I had somehow missed that, somewhere along the way, it had become real for Julian. He sucked in a sharp breath and turned back to me. His face had no expression save the carefully controlled look that I had seen a dozen times before when he had to sit in judgment of a fellow jacker.

  Tears jumped to my eyes and my chest seized up. Please, no.

  “Anna is right,” Julian said, his voice flat. “I need to…” His eyelid twitched like the words were causing him pain. “I need to get my priorities straight.” He sucked air in between his teeth. “We need to neutralize Vellus. We need to buy time. We have to use every resource that we have. Your father has access to him. We need you to try to stop Vellus.” His words were choppy bits that he spit out, one at a time, each one a blow that knocked my world a little more out of alignment.

  Julian wasn’t sending me away, he was sending me on a mission. The only one that I didn’t want to do. One that Julian didn’t want me to do, because apparently he was in love with me, something I had just figured out ten seconds ago. And yet he was asking me to do it anyway, because it was what the JFA needed.

  There was no way I could say no.

  “Is that an order?” My voice was barely a whisper. It would be easier for me to do if he ordered me. His face showed a crack in the rigid mask he had put on, but it disappeared quickly. In that moment, I hated myself for asking.

  “No,” he said. “I would never… no. You can say no. You should say—”

  “Julian.” It was as much a gasp as a word. “Anna’s right, he has to be stopped. I’ll do it.”

  His shoulders stiffened, and his mouth drew into a tight line. He nodded once, sharply, then strode past me, leaving me in the privacy room with the door wide open.

  Just like the hole in my heart.

  I shifted on the rough wooden chair, bringing out another creak that made me cringe. The chair was devoid of a comfortable spot, despite my efforts to find one. How did Julian spend an entire chat-cast in it without going crazy? I stared into the tiny round eye of the camera, ignoring Hinckley’s scraggly face behind it, determined to finish what I started, no matter how much it made me squirm.

  “I’m sorry… well, I’m just sorry for being such an idiot,” I said into the camera.

  Hinckley paused, then lowered the slim silver device. “Is that it?”

  I grimaced. “Was there something else you wanted me to say?”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, this is your recording. I was just asking if you were done.”

  I nodded, closing my eyes and trying to ratchet down the tension in my body. This mission was likely a one-way operation. If we were caught, it would be bad enough for Sasha and worse for my dad, but the real danger was to the JFA—Julian was right that Vellus would put me in front of the cameras. Which is why I went straight from the privacy room to the JFA’s cast room.

  But that wasn’t why a fluttery panic was beating inside my chest.

  Julian loves me.

  The charming, charismatic leader of the revolution wanted more than a Friend-in-Chief. More, when all I had to give was a whistling hole in my heart. I gave what little I could to the camera and the chat-cast that Julian had spent four months trying to persuade me to do. I had mumbled a few things about the revolution, about Julian, about how jackers needed to stick together. Things that I had been thinking all along, but never said out loud, at least not to Julian.

  It was all I had.

  I took a deep breath to calm the panic and opened my eyes. Hinckley had pulled the memory disk from the camera and held it out between his long, stringy fingers. “This is the whole thing.”

  I didn’t take the small, black square disk from Hinckley’s outstretched hand. “You hold on to it.”

  His eyebrows hiked up. “I thought you’d want to, you know, give it to Julian personally.”

  I slid off the uncomfortable chair and peered up into Hinckley’s face. He was in his twenties, but his forehead was creased by seriousness. Or maybe his years of mindwork for the military had aged him early.

  “The only way Julian’s going to see that recording is if this mission blows up in our faces.”

  His somber look didn’t change, but he nodded. “Then I’ll have it for you when you return.”

  I gave him a grim smile, appreciating his confidence. “The next time you see me, I may be on a tru-cast saying things I would only say if Vellus had a gun to my head. If that happens, you give that recording to Julian. But not before.”

  “Understood." He pocketed the tiny chip in his camouflage pants.

  I strode out of the JFA’s chat-cast room, my body buzzing. I tried taking more deep breaths to calm myself and gather my wits. Between Julian kissing me and me spilling my guts on the chat-cast recording with Hinckley, I was adrift on a stormy sea of emotion with nothing to hold me down.

  When I reached the kitchen, I ignored the glances and whispers from Hinckley’s crew-cut men, still hanging out at the tables, and went straight for the cabinets. I rummaged through them, strapping on a miniature dart gun and a small-caliber pistol, one on each leg, plus a couple of extra med patches, a bulletproof vest, and a handheld, jacker-tuned Taser for good measure. I would have brought the butterflies—mobile attack Tasers just for jackers that Julian had lifted from the Feds and reverse-engineered—but the launch gun was bulky, and I was already weighed down too much. It was all probably unnecessary anyway. This had to be a stealth mission in order for Sasha to get close enough to Vellus to neutralize him. If we were shooting our way in—or out—it meant we had failed. And there was Julian’s PR angle to consider: I might get a kill jack on Vellus, but getting away with it was a whole different story.

  I glanced around for Sasha and found him back in the racks with Julian. They stood close together, far down the center row, but I still heard Julian’s harsh tone. I wasn’t sure if Sasha was getting instructions or chastisements, but they were words Julian probably meant for me. Only Sasha had to take them instead.

  I splayed my hands on the pitted wood of the kitchen counter and closed my eyes, wishing I could control my emotions like I could my fast-twitch muscles or adrenaline. During my early explorations of my mind, I had found a trigger for dopamine, but it had left me in a freaky, jittery daze for hours. I would simply have to deal with the fact that I was an emotional mess.

  Or use my coping mechanism of choice: ignore it.

  I opened my eyes, pulled another pistol out of the cabinet, and tucked it in the back of my pants. Sasha had wandered to the front, finding Ava at the far edge of the kitchen area. He was holding her, whispering to her, their faces close. I looked away, ignoring the emotion that surged up through my fake outer calm.

  I would wait for him outside.

  I grabbed a white-hooded coat on the way out into the early afternoon sun, stepping through the door before I even zipped it, all in my haste to get out of the building. Only after I was outside, leaning against the frigid brick of the JFA entrance, did it occur to me that I hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. The way they were avoiding my gaze when I first came in, it was probably just as well. And I had no clue what to say to Julian. With a twinge, I realized we hadn’t actually said much of anything in the privacy room.

  The streets were still empty, hushed by the specter of the Guard and the uncertainty of the future. I felt the pressure of a hundred eyes peering from behind curt
ains, a thousand minds anxiously waiting for the JFA to stop the threat that was hemming us in. I licked my lips, already chapped by the wind, and drummed my heel against the wall, ready to get on with doing my part.

  After a few minutes, Sasha pushed open the door and strode into the wind, followed by Myrtle. I threw a questioning look to the diminutive woman who was the adopted grandma of most of Jackertown's changelings, but she didn’t say anything, just shuffled next to me, out of the wind. Julian must think we needed his strongest jacker along on this mission, although I couldn’t see why. We weren’t likely to brute-force our way in. Still, I was glad she was here. Her lilac-soap smell reassured me even more than her nod and the wave of her fingerless hand-knitted gloves.

  Sasha stood in his ultralite, no flak jacket or winter coat, with his arms crossed, staring down the street. The wind made his dark, curly hair dance along his forehead.

  I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “So, did Julian chew you out again?”

  Sasha looked sideways at me, and I realized I was biting my lip. I stopped.

  “He was giving me instructions,” Sasha said carefully.

  “For the op?”

  “Not specifically.” His dark eyes seemed full of warmth, not the hollowness they normally evoked. “He said not to come back without you.”

  I swallowed, my face heating up. “We’re all going to come back from this,” I managed to get out.

  “That’s what I told Ava, too.” He went back to studying the street, but I cringed at his implication. That we all knew the danger, and that I had consoled Julian the way Sasha consoled Ava, by telling her the best possible outcome: that we would all come home. Only I hadn’t even said goodbye.

  “I made a deal with Julian, though,” Sasha continued. “That while I was gone, he wouldn’t send Ava on any missions.”

  “She’s not going to like that,” I said, trying to lighten my tone.

  “I know.” He half-smiled, which tore at me, then he turned to look at me again. “But Julian understands. He knows it kills me every time Ava puts herself in danger.” He cleared his throat and returned his stare to the horizon. “I don’t need the distraction, you know?”

  Julian understands… so Sasha knew how Julian felt about me. Which meant Ava had to know, even thought she’d never said a thing. Did Anna know? With a sinking feeling, her words on the rooftop made sudden sense. Julian’s important… we can’t have him distracted by things that aren’t central to the cause. He needs to keep his focus.

  Did everyone know but me? Had I been in a cloud for the last four months? The answer to that was painfully obvious: yes, I had. A fog of emotional wreckage caused by losing Raf. The hole in my life wasn’t only the pain of having my love ripped literally out of his mind. It was the empty space where he used to be. The boy who understood me, even when I didn’t understand myself. When he lost that, something came unmoored, untethered, inside me.

  There were holes in me too.

  All those times when Julian leaned close, all those times I resisted thoughts of inappropriate hugs—was it just that instinctual love surging back? Or was it something more, and I’d just been oblivious to it as I’d been to Julian’s feelings all along? I thought he was the leader of the revolution I had thrown my heart and soul into, to bury the pain of losing Raf.

  Now… I wasn’t sure what Julian was anymore.

  “We should get moving, Kira,” Myrtle said quietly by my side. I nodded and turned my face into the wind, letting the wintery breeze wipe clean my tangled thoughts of Julian and Raf. I needed to focus on the mission. Make sure that Sasha could keep his promise to Ava to come home.

  I shaded my eyes and peered down the road. It was a good mile to the perimeter in that direction. “I’ll have to get closer to see if the National Guard has blocked this street.”

  “They have—I had Ava check.” Sasha gestured down the street with his chin. “There are fewer Guards a block over from the main street than anywhere else. That’s probably the best place to try to breach the blockade.”

  “Right,” I said, glancing at Myrtle. “You up for a road trip, Myrtle?”

  She pulled her stuffed winter coat tighter around her, looking like a tiny puff marshmallow. “Lead the way.”

  We marched down the street, shiny with the late-afternoon sun, until I could mentally reach the perimeter. The National Guardsmen were easy to find, tiny floating spots impenetrable to my reach. There was a string of them, spaced evenly as far as my reach could go. They thinned out a couple of blocks to the north. We cut down a side alleyway that crept up on the perimeter.

  At the end of the alley, we peeked around the corner, then pulled back. There were four along this strip of street—one close on the south end and three toward the north end. They all had large, semiautomatic weapons, urban military fatigues, and of course anti-mindjacking helmets. At least the fencing hadn’t reached this stretch of perimeter yet.

  Sasha frowned. “I don’t like the size of their guns. Or our odds on this, Kira.”

  “We need a distraction,” I agreed. I cast my mind out, roaming over both sides of the street. A group of changelings had stolen out to the steps of their brownstone apartment two streets over. I’d like to think the Guardsmen wouldn’t shoot a bunch of kids, but I was completely unwilling to find out if I was wrong on that.

  My reach showed three demens clustered a block away, on the far side of the street, outside of Jackertown. The demens normally didn’t gather together, not liking the peppermint-flavored madness of each other’s thought waves any more than normal mindreaders did. The sudden sting of their mindscents on the back of my tongue made me choke. I muffled my cough with my hand to avoid attracting the attention of the Guards and pulled out of the demens’ heads for a moment to recover.

  The demens were living up to their name, fighting over a battered box like it was a treasure chest. It was just the kind of disturbance we were looking for. Only we needed it moved one block to the west and south.

  “One distraction coming up,” I said to Sasha and Myrtle. “North end of the street. Be ready to run.” I braced my hand against the cold cement wall as I jacked back into the dizzying thoughts of the demens. One of them had managed to wrest the box from the other two. I jacked him to take off with his booty toward the Guardsmen two blocks away. His fellow demens sprinted after him in hot pursuit. I pulled out of his head as soon as I dared, hoping the jack would hold. Now that he was being chased, he ran faster of his own accord, and I simply nudged him in the right direction.

  I hoped the Guardsmen wouldn’t shoot him.

  The lead demens sprinted out of the alley, stumbled, and fell on top of his box. Three of the four Guardsmen swung their rifles in his direction. The fourth—the one nearest to our alleyway hideout—kept his gun pointed at the ground, watching. Tripping may have saved the demens his life. The Guards hesitated once he was sprawled on the ground. Then the other two demens burst out onto the street and piled on the downed guy, who held on to his flattened box like his life depended on it.

  The Guards’ guns went slack as they slowly drifted toward the demens. They must have been given orders to keep jackers in, not keep the demens out.

  “It’s not working,” Sasha said in a hushed voice. He was right. The fourth Guardsmen would see us if we tried to cross, and his buddies would leave the demens in a heartbeat to come after us. The Guardsmen’s laughter rolled down the street as they watched the spectacle.

  “Wait.” I plunged into the spinning madness of two demens at once. They leaped up and lunged for two separate Guardsmen. The third Guardsmen joined the first two in beating back the demens with their fists and the butts of their guns. The fourth Guard tensed, raising his rifle but holding his ground.

  I pounded my fist against the cement wall. I needed something else. Fast. I closed my eyes, breathing in and out—ten, nine, down the elevator, find the thread. Focus, Kira!

  “What are you doing?” I heard Myrtle’s gruff voice, but I igno
red her.

  There was no time to wait for every muscle in my body to flip to fast-twitch. Just my legs, then. I only needed a quick burst of speed, and I couldn’t afford the blowback anyway—we still had to get to the suburbs and execute the rest of the op. The switch zinged through my legs, and I didn’t wait to open my eyes before I started running. I flung my mind out to find the blank spot of the Guardsman’s anti-jacker helmet and honed in like a missile.

  My eyes opened right before I hit him. We fell in what seemed like slow motion, and something scraped along my arm. Before the momentum carried me away from him, I hooked my fingers through the cage of his anti-jacker helmet, wrenching his head back and pulling him with me as we skidded across the gravelly pavement. He was stunned, but he flailed against my hold, trying to find his dropped gun. I twisted my fast-twitch legs on the pavement and braced my sneakers against his helmet and chest, grabbing with both hands under his chin for his helmet strap. He stopped reaching for the gun and grasped at my hands, but he was too late. The strap came loose and the helmet slid off. I jacked him unconscious before he could think to call out to his fellow Guardsmen.

  They were still busy with the demens down the street.

  Fortunately Sasha had figured out what I was doing. He and Myrtle were already on the other side of the perimeter. I rolled away from the limp body of the Guardsman and tried to scramble to my feet, but the mini-blowback had already struck. Somehow I got up, but it was like walking on strings of spaghetti. I stumbled for the alley where Sasha and Myrtle had taken cover as shouts came from the Guardsmen down the street. Sasha caught me, and with him under one arm and tiny Myrtle under the other, we hobbled down the alley.

  We turned down one street, crossed over, and ducked in another alley. My legs screamed in protest. I ignored them. Another street, then two. I reached back, but we’d put enough distance between us and the Guardsmen that they were out of my range.

  Relief washed through me when we ducked into an abandoned building to hide. Sasha pulled out his phone to hail an autocab. He had Julian’s special frequency that tapped in to the autocab network and overrode the normal programming that prevented them from coming within a mile of Jackertown. If we were lucky, it would get here before the Guardsmen could search all the empty buildings between us.