I wondered how often she’d tried to get the Tau meds to see a treatment from her perspective and failed. I imagined the hidden slurs that hadn’t been hidden from her, the kinds of harassment, the pressure she’d endured, day after day, just to get the training she’d needed to work with Joby. It had taken guts and strength, no matter what her motives were. And no matter what her motives were, since she’d been with Joby she’d done more to help him than any human could have done.
She was still gazing out into the room, though I wasn’t sure now whether she was just avoiding my eyes. “Once we had the technology too,” she said. “Once it was better than anything Humans ever had—” I wondered if that was true, or just something HARM wanted to believe. She glanced down, as if she had her own doubts. “Tau won’t even let us access their database. If they’d just give us that much to work with—” She broke off.
“They claim it’s impossible for Hydrans to wear the kind of neural taps that Humans use. But that’s a lie—”
… Psions don’t even need a tap.… Her words became the carrier wave for another voice speaking: deep in my memory, a human freak named Deadeye was telling me again how just by being a freak he’d found a way of turning psi into cyber without any bioware at all.
The EM activity that made the warp and weft of the Net’s hidden universe existed outside a psion’s normal range of function. But once Deadeye had discovered an interface was possible, there was nothing to stop him, or any psion, from becoming a ghost in the machine … except Federation law and a mandatory brainwipe.
But that didn’t change the fact that any Hydran could create a psionic cyberlink … if someone had the guts to show them how.
Deadeye had barely trusted me with his secret; he didn’t need to tell me why. If the Feds or the combines had learned what he’d done, xenophobia would spread like a plague through Federation space, and the noose of persecution around the neck of every psion, human or Hydran, would tighten.…
I wasn’t ready to face the consequences of setting a change like that in motion. I turned back to Miya, pushing the thought out of my head.
Miya was gone. I searched the crowd, half afraid she’d abandoned me, until I spotted her standing across the room beside Naoh. Whatever they were doing, it didn’t seem to include me. I stayed where I was, trying to ignore the looks I got from the Hydrans moving past me, trying not to think about their absence in my mind, or mine in theirs. I wondered what had happened to make Miya and her sister forget my existence completely, in such a public place.
I shifted from foot to foot, grimacing as I noticed the time, wondering whether I was going to make it back to Riverton before somebody discovered I was gone; wondering what Kissindre would do if I didn’t. Wondering what she was doing now, sleeping, or—
Someone touched me. Someone put their hand down the front of my pants and squeezed. “Jeezu—!” I grabbed my crotch, searching the room with a kind of panic. No one was close enough to have touched me. Any Hydran who got near me always seemed to veer away.
But then I saw the woman standing across the room, gazing at me through the Brownian motion of bodies. She was Hydran, like everyone here except me. But there was something about her any human male would recognize instinctively—the way she dressed, the look in her eyes as she started toward me. I knew a whore when I saw one.
“Oh, my God,” I muttered, because something was touching me again, and it wasn’t an invisible hand. It felt like a mouth. “Oh, my God.”
I stood there, paralyzed by disbelief and sensation, as she reached my side. “Hello, Human,” she said, speaking Standard. She smiled, a vacant rictus, her glance searching for my databand before it found my face. “I know what you want—” She broke off as she got a good look at me. I watched her expression as she tried to grope my mind the way she’d groped my body; watched her hit the wall. Just for a second she lost her composure the way I’d lost mine. Then her smile came back, as automatic as breathing. “That’s okay, honey,” she murmured. “I can still give you what you need.…” What she’d been doing to me suddenly got so intense that I gasped.
“Stop it!” I hissed, glad I was wearing a coat.
“You don’t want me to stop.…” She reached out, laid actual hands on me, running her fingers along the coat’s seal. “I know you didn’t come to Freaktown to spend the night in this place—” She jerked her head at the room around us. “Come spend it at mine.”
I peeled her hands off my coat, reaching out with my mind to block her sending at the source, one psi response I could still control. “I don’t want it,” I said, “and I’m not paying for it.”
She stepped back, blinking, and I couldn’t tell whether the surprise on her face came from what I’d said or what I’d done. She started to turn away, and suddenly she was face-to-face with Miya. There was an endless moment of silence between them. Naoh came up behind Miya; the prostitute made a gesture I recognized, that took them both in. And then she disappeared into thin air.
I swore under my breath. My erection felt like a red-hot poker as the two women turned to look at me.
I watched Miya search for words: “She was—”
“I know what she was,” I muttered. “I know when I’m being hustled.” I took a deep breath, feeling the heat and pressure begin to ease. The two of them staring at me was a real cold shower, but Miya made a strange moue with her mouth.
“I thought humans weren’t allowed to come here after curfew,” I said thickly. I thought about Oldcity, how it only came alive at night, when the darkness up above matched the darkness down below, the darkness inside the people who came there to satisfy hungers it wasn’t safe to feed in the light of day. It didn’t surprise me to realize there were people like that even in Tau Riverton. There were always people like that, with needs like that. It shouldn’t surprise me to learn they’d found a way to satisfy them.
“There’s a big midday trade,” Miya said, expressionless now. “Some good Tau citizens have such a craving for the ‘exotic’ that they even stay overnight.”
I grunted. “What was she doing here?” There couldn’t be a lot of human marks looking for alien sex at midnight in a Freaktown hospital.
“Probably getting a disease treated,” Naoh said sourly. “I would rather starve to death than have sex with a human.” She looked away, her eyes haunted by something darker and more twisted than simple revulsion.
“Maybe you’ve just never been hungry enough,” I said. I saw Miya’s face freeze. Naoh turned back. I watched her swallow an angry response and wondered what it was that stopped her, what she wouldn’t say to me.
Miya gave me another look, long and searching this time; but it didn’t tell me anything. And then her eyes changed, as if she’d heard something I couldn’t.
Naoh glanced away, distracted by the same silent message. “He’s gone!” she burst out, as if this time she couldn’t stop herself. “Navu is gone.”
“Again?” Miya murmured, with infinite weariness. “Navu.…”
“He didn’t even tell anyone. He just walked out.” Naoh shook her head, pacing like a cat.
Navu. I wondered who he was, why he mattered to them, why they were talking about him the way I’d talk about a deadhead.
“Then you know where we’ll find him,” Miya said, resigned. Not how. Where.
Naoh did something that made Miya wince, but she nodded. The look that passed between them left me out entirely.
But then they looked back at me. “Come with us,” Naoh said grudgingly. “Come and learn something else.”
Before I could even answer, I felt their psi wrap itself around my senses—
* * *
Everything changed in an eyeblink … everything was totally unfamiliar again. I shook my head, feeling queasy, wondering how much more of this jerking around I could take before I vomited. “Damn it—” I broke off.
We were standing in shadows, in the most claustrophobic alley I’d seen so far in Freaktown. The darkness was deepe
r than night; the only light I could see was overhead, a narrow sliver of indigo sky.
There were other Hydrans around us again; the half-visible spasms of their startled bodies told me they hadn’t been expecting us. I heard grunts and curses, heard some of them scramble out of reach.
Naoh turned and moved deeper into the pit of shadows. Miya took me by the arm, drawing me after her, proving that Naoh hadn’t walked through a wall, but only through a hidden doorway. She led me down a hall so black that even my eyes couldn’t make out any detail. She seemed to be navigating by touch. I couldn’t tell whether she was using her hand or a teleport’s special sense. She moved like she’d done this before—something I couldn’t manage.
The tunnel echoed with formless noises, more unnerving even than the place where HARM was keeping Joby. I wondered why we hadn’t teleported directly to the spot where Naoh and Miya wanted to be: whether it was too risky; what the limits really were on their ability to sound out a space large enough to teleport into.
Naoh pushed aside a heavy blanket and light streamed out, blinding.
The stench hit me full in the face as I ducked through the hidden doorway into the light—piss and unwashed bodies, garbage and decay. “Jeezu!” I covered my nose, more to block the memories than the smells.
There had been too many scenes like this in my life … I’d been a part of too many of them. This one was a dozen or so people, all Hydran, squatting on the bare, filthy floor or slumped against the peeling walls of a windowless room. Two or three staggered to their feet to stare at us. The living dead. I didn’t know what kind of drug they were on, but it didn’t really matter. In the end it was all the same.
“Navu!” Naoh called, striding across the room like it was empty. Miya followed her, just as unflinching, but never stepping on a helpless outstretched hand. They hauled one of the addicts up between them and held him against the wall. They were speaking to him, out loud but in voices so low that I couldn’t hear what they said. I started across the room through the muttered complaints, the stench and the filth. Things I didn’t even want to think about stuck to the soles of my boots. I kept my eyes straight ahead, not glancing at anyone for longer than I had to. Straight ahead of me, Navu looked better than most of them, not as starved, not as dirty. But then, he’d just left a rehab facility.
I stopped in front of him. Miya and Naoh looked back at me, breaking off their conversation by some silent consent.
“Your brother?” I asked Miya.
“No,” Miya said, and the way she said it told me the only other thing he could be: Naoh’s lover. Ex-lover. She looked back at him again as he shifted in her grasp.
The look on his face said he didn’t want to be there, trapped between the two of them, but he didn’t disappear. I wondered whether they were blocking his psi, not letting him escape. He looked at me. I watched him struggle to focus on my face. “Wha’, Miya?” he mumbled. “You fu’ing Humans now?” And then I knew what drug he was on, why he hadn’t disappeared, why all the other addicts were still here around us.
The golden skin of Miya’s face turned cinnamon. She shoved him away.
Naoh let him go too. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, looking sullen. “Lemme ‘lone, bitches,” he said. The human word stood out like an upraised finger in the flow of Hydran speech.
“You’re disgusting,” Naoh said. She shoved him with her foot. “Get up, you pathetic—”
I caught her arm, pulling her back. “Stop it.”
Something intangible struck my hand away from her sleeve. The same pain and disgust were in her eyes as she looked at me, as if contact with me was too much like contact with him.
I backed up, shaking off my own sense of invisible molestation.
Miya crouched down beside Navu. I watched her try to get him to respond; watched him turn his face away. I saw the drug patch on his neck: Nephase. The same drug the Corpses had used on me. They used it on all the freaks, to keep them from escaping.…
Escape. That was what he wanted, what they all wanted in this room. Escape from the Gift: the thing that made them unique; the thing that made them suffer. “If that’s how you feel,” I said to Naoh, “why did you bother coming after him?”
“You don’t know how I feel!” she snapped.
I couldn’t deny it. I looked down.
Miya stood up, her shoulders bowed. “Navu…” she said, still looking down at him, holding out her hand.
He didn’t look up. Neither did anyone else. We could have been Corporate Security come to arrest him—we could drag him cursing and kicking out of here—and I knew nobody would lift a finger to help him.
Suddenly I felt like I was suffocating. I turned and started for the door, tripping over legs, stepping on hands.
Miya followed me; so did Naoh. Or maybe they’d just had enough.
I stood outside in the relatively open air of the alley, taking deep breaths.
“So, mebtaku, you had to turn your face away?” Naoh gestured at the alley around us, at the hidden room in the derelict building we’d just come out of. I thought I saw tracks of wetness on her face, but in the faint light I wasn’t sure. “We don’t have the choice of turning away—” Her voice fell apart, with rage or grief, I couldn’t tell.
“That wasn’t why,” I said, my own voice hoarse.
“Why, then?” Miya asked. The words were as cool as the fragile moonlight reaching down to touch us where we stood. I wondered where she found the strength to maintain that kind of control, when everyone around her seemed to be losing it. Maybe having spent so much time around Hydran-hating humans had taught her more than she realized.
“I—” My voice broke. “I guess it doesn’t matter where you come from. Junkies are all the same.”
Naoh spun around. Her telekinetic field slammed me back against the wall.
“Naoh!” Miya stopped herself with an effort from coming to my side.
I pushed away from the wall, shaking my head. “I was speaking from personal experience.”
Miya touched her head, gave a shrug of incomprehension. “You knew an addict?”
“I was an addict.”
I saw them look at each other in the silver half-light.
“When?” Naoh demanded.
“For a long time.”
“Why?”
That wasn’t the question I would have asked, but it deserved an answer. “Same reasons as them in there, I suppose.”
She was silent for a moment. “You stopped. How?”
I realized where her mind still was; what she was really asking me. But I didn’t have an answer for that. I shook my head again, looking away. “Where do they get the drugs?” I asked. The shadow-forms of more addicts were taking shape in the darkness around us as my eyes adjusted to the night.
Naoh gave Miya a look I couldn’t read. Miya glanced down and didn’t say anything. I wondered again what they wouldn’t tell me. And I wondered why.
“Tell us who you are,” Miya murmured, changing the subject in a way that was way too obvious. “Tell us what happened to you—to your Gift. I don’t even know your name.”
It occurred to me that Grandmother could have told her how to find me. I wondered what else she already knew. I hated feeling like everyone on this side of the fucking planet was talking behind my back right in front of me. “My name is Cat,” I said.
“Your parents—?” she urged, and I heard something in her voice that I couldn’t feel in her thoughts. It told me that what I said next was important, more important than any self-consciousness I had about sharing my past with strangers.
I leaned against the cold surface of the wall. “My mother was Hydran. My father … wasn’t.” I looked up at the sliver of sky, down again at the alleyway that already felt too much like home. “I was born on Ardattee, in a place called Oldcity. My mother died when I was small—someone killed her. I felt her die.…” I rubbed my hand across my mouth.
“Was that … why you helped me th
en?” Miya whispered.
I nodded, closing my eyes. “Because, when she needed help … nobody was there.” I felt Miya touch me, and suddenly it took all my control to hold myself together. “I lost my Gift. I lived like—a human, for a long time.…” I rubbed my hand across my mouth.
Then one day the FTA had picked me off the streets. And suddenly I’d gone from one more piece of expendable trash in Old-city’s human refuse dump straight into a dreamworld. They’d promised me a databand, a future, a life I’d never even dared to hope for—if I cooperated.
The FTA had cleaned me up and glued my brains back together just enough to let me function as a psion. I was a telepath and nothing else, but I’d been a good one.… I finally had something to be proud of, something that was really mine. Something I thought no one would ever be able to take away from me.
Finally I’d had something to lose.
The Feds hadn’t taken in a bunch of freaks and rehabilitated us out of the goodness of their hearts. A conspiracy of shipping combines had hired a psion terrorist the Feds knew only as “Quicksilver” to compromise the Federation’s telhassium supply. Telhassium crystals were what the Federation ran on: nothing humans could create could match the data storage capacity of telhassium’s superdense molecular structure. Telhassium was the thing that made interstellar travel possible—the thing that gave the FTA its economic leverage against the independent cartels.
Quicksilver had lived up to his name; the FTA hadn’t been able to get its hands on him. So they’d decided to fight fire with fire by sending a suicide squad of freaks undercover. I’d been part of it.
“We stopped him. But to do it I had to kill him.” I listened to myself tell the story, every word as empty now as the place inside my head where Quicksilver’s mind had immolated and taken my psi with it. “No one could put me back together again after that. That’s why I’m … closed.” I touched my head. I thought of Kissindre Perrymeade, suddenly. The other side of the river seemed to be light-years away, and receding.