Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (16 page)

“This is good,” I told her. You had to be sure to compliment someone who cooked for you. You wanted the person to do it again, right?

“My grandmother would be turning over in her grave to hear you say that.” Cherabino turned off the stove and brought her own bowl over. “If I’d tried to serve this to family, she would have hit me with her spoon. It’s passable, but not great.”

“
I
think it’s good.”

Cherabino rolled her eyes and started eating. After she’d had a few bites, she paused. “Unless there’s a break in the case, I’ll be off work Thursday.”

I nodded, finishing up the last of my bowl.

“I assume you’re still planning on dogging my every move, then, right?”

I nodded again, wondering if I could get away with licking the bowl. Microwaved rehydrated dehydrated food—my steady diet these days—just wasn’t the same.

She sat back. “Okay. What would it take to get you to go away on my day off?” Her mind flashed the man’s face again, a feeling of loss, and a bouquet of lilies.

I ignored the images and put my fork all the way down. “I am
not
going to leave you. Not now. Not tomorrow, not the day after. Not at all, not until this is over.”

She looked at me, annoyed, but very close. There. So
there
. And suddenly I wanted to kiss her….

She looked away and stood up. She grabbed the bowls—hers still half eaten—and started loading the washer-box.

The evening was spent in work. She went over her case notes, spreading out the paper on her dining room table. Not wanting to get very far away, I sat at the opposite end and tried to be productive.

I wrote down the vision, word for word, as detailed as I could get it. I got caught up on my interview notes from the last few days. I spent about a half hour familiarizing myself with the local Mindspace, putting out markers so I’d be able to scan it quickly later. And finally, when there was nothing else to do, I got myself some vitamin-C juice from the fridge and sat down next to Cherabino.

“Have you heard from Kara?”

She looked up. “Who’s Kara?”

I paused. “The Guild attaché. The one I left a message with. Was supposed to call me back? Main liaison for the Guild?”

She set down her pen on the stack of papers in front of her and gave me her full attention. “So how come you’re on a first-name basis?”

“Um, let’s just say we go way back.”

She lifted an eyebrow, but when I didn’t say anything, only offered, “Can we trust her?” Considering what was going on in her head, the question was heavily ironic. But if she wasn’t going to say anything, neither was I.

Instead, I sipped my juice and thought about it seriously. Could I trust Kara? “There was a time when I would have said yes right away. A lot of shit has happened since then, and, really, her family’s always been political.” I wanted to trust her. I wanted to believe she was still the same person I’d shared a bed—and my mind—with years ago. But when she’d stood up against me on the day the Guild had thrown me out, when she’d cast me to the wolves…“I don’t know. Depends on what we’re talking about.”

She shook her head. “Should we go looking for another ally or not?”

I sighed. “No, Kara…Kara isn’t a killer. That I can tell you. And she wouldn’t stand for a killer hiding out in the ranks of the Guild. It’s bad PR, for one thing, and she was always going on about purity of purpose and internal government. I’d rather stick with her.” I took a breath. “Certainly rather than Enforcement. Those guys have a bad habit of riding in and taking anything not nailed down—including your memories.”

Cherabino put the pen down. “I asked because the assistant to the Guild attaché called today and left a message on my phone. Apparently she—this Kara
person—wants to meet tomorrow. I need to know, can we trust her not to take this case away? How is she as a person?”

“She’s a professional,” I said. “She’ll do her job.”

But Cherabino was looking at me skeptically. “What was your job at the Guild? This construction thing.”

“Construct, Deconstruction, Structure, they’re all fine. No one says Construction.”

“Fine. Structure. Explain to me what you did for Structure.” She was annoyed, but she wasn’t uncomfortable. At least not at this moment.

Where to start? “You know I wasn’t always an addict, right?”

She gestured for me to continue. Stole a sip of my juice. I moved the glass in front of her. If she wanted the half that was left, she could have it.

“Ten years ago I was a professor,” I said.

“A professor?” she asked, surprised. She ran a few numbers in her head.

“I was young,” I confirmed. “But brilliant. And I had a talent nobody else had had in two generations—I could teach a whole class of students the same lesson at the same time.”

She huffawed. “Really? A teacher that could teach a whole classroom? Awesome talent, that!”

“No, really,” I came back. “Telepathy isn’t like literature. You can’t read a book and understand something immediately. There’s a process. You learn by seeing, by doing, by having someone guide you until you can pick it up on your own. You learn by experience, yours or someone else’s and—”

“You realize I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, right?” Her mouth quirked.

I blew out a long line of air. “Okay. I didn’t teach the basic classes—by the time the students got to me, they
were too far into the Guild to ever see a college or want to, but let’s call it PhD-level work. Or, better analogy, the neurosurgery stuff you only get to see three years after you leave medical school.”

I frowned and looked at my hands. “Actually, brain surgery’s a good way to think about deconstruction, only you’re working with the brain’s software, not the physical stuff. Deconstructionist training is practical. You learn to take apart a mind piece by piece, to remove the sane and healthy bits—or to replace them—at will. Mistakes happen—there’ve been personalities changing drastically after a ‘construct’—but there are plenty of coma victims who’ve regained their lives. It’s a worthwhile profession.”

Cherabino shifted in her chair. “Sounds like a double-edged sword to me. If you can bring them out of a coma, I’ll bet you can put them in one.”

I nodded. “There is that. The Guild—heartless, self-interested bastards that they are—” She gave me an ironic look; I ignored it and kept going. “They don’t strictly care how you use the skills. Good, evil, whatever, so long as the evil you practice is affiliated with a major governmental organization and you don’t step on the Guild’s toes in the process. Or else they get involved. And trust me, it is
not
a good thing when the Guild gets involved.”

She frowned, finished the juice. “You taught the coma stuff?”

“That and other things, the capstone deconstruction training. They only got to take it after they passed about eight rounds of screening and had a strong shot at a job; the Guild doesn’t believe in flooding the market. Depending on the job market in black ops and major metropolitan hospitals, some years I had thirty students, some two. There were a couple of other
organizations that hired deconstructionists, but those were the main two, and since I was teaching the class, they could actually fill the jobs as fast as they had openings.”

“Because you were so darn special.”

I shrugged. “They’d been looking for a systematic deconstructionist professor for at least sixty years, since John Xavier got shot in broad daylight in the middle of the Tech Wars. Without a guy like me, you have to apprentice under another structure person for ten years or more, pick things up slowly with a lot of work—that’s how I did it, finishing the work early at twenty-three. They found me when a teacher caught me tutoring two other students at the same time—I was short of sleep, and it seemed more efficient than doing it twice. My whole life changed that night.

“I’m kinda rare, or was. Teaching deconstruction is
much
harder than it sounds. Maybe five percent of all Guild members can even
see
the finer structures of the mind, and only a third of that have the control to manipulate them. And then, imagine letting thirty people piggyback on your thoughts as you pluck at the invisible spiderweb strings…keeping the plate in your left hand spinning while your right hand performs delicate brain surgery. Only a lot more so. The brain is forgiving of screwups; the mind not so much. Kill a few cells in a clump somewhere, mostly your brain learns to adapt. Kill a processing router in the back of the software of your mind and you might never think in color again. Or worse, lose the ability to learn new names. Or faces. Or much, much worse. That stuff, you kinda notice—and those are easy mistakes for a deconstructionist to make.

“But it’s worth doing. You could help a person who’d just had a head injury to reroute that processor to
another part of the mind. You could help a man see movement for the first time ever or recognize his wife’s face for the first time in years. That’s the cool stuff, the stuff you’d pay anything for, the stuff the Guild charges the sun and the moon for.
That
is what I could teach a man (or a woman, or a monkey, so long as he was Abled) to do—in four years or less compared to the fifteen years to get one guy trained. I made the Guild unthinkable amounts of money.”

“Not that you’re confident or anything.”

“Not at all.”

“So why aren’t you still doing it?”

I looked away. “I couldn’t. After I got hooked on Satin, the numbers worked in the beginning. But I couldn’t teach anymore—I couldn’t do two impossible things at once, not even after they locked me in a box for two weeks to make me dry out.”

Her eyes went blank as she processed that, but I went on, unable to stop.

“The only thing worse than not having a deconstructionist teacher is having one who’s worthless to you. The Guild let me know I wasn’t welcome in no uncertain terms.”

I studied the old wooden dining table where we were sitting, her case notes spread out. It had been that final rejection by the Guild that had made me turn to the poison even worse, that made me fall off the wagon so badly, it took a team of cops and a truly traumatic memory to begin to find me again. The Guild did not want me anymore—and no one treats you worse than the best friend you’ve betrayed.

I went outside for a cigarette—or three. I wasn’t sure why I’d told her all of that. It had been a long, long time
since I’d talked about that. I wondered if it changed anything, if she’d trust me any better now. I stood there, smoking, trying to decide. Probably not, I settled on. It wouldn’t change freaking anything.

I walked in the house and shut the door. She threw me a blanket with excessive force. I caught it, but the top still hit me in the face. I forced the fabric down. Pylar. What?

“What’s this?”

She gave me a
look
. “You’re on the couch.”

I looked at the short, gray, overstuffed couch four feet to my right, then back at her. “There’s no way I’m going to fit on that.” For one thing, it was almost long enough for a short sixth grader to lie down on lengthwise. Almost. For another thing, I was a long time out of sixth grade. I reined in my temper.

“I can get you a pillow,” Cherabino said, with no expression. “Or you can take the floor. Your choice.”

I rearranged my grip on the blanket, trying to gather up the part that was falling. I had one shot at this, if I really meant to protect her. “Look, Cherabino, the couch—not that I’m criticizing it—is too short. I’ll never fit. And
more importantly
,” I said over the top of her protest, “it’s way too far from you. The whole point of me being here is to make sure nothing happens to you. There’s no way I can do that if you’re all the way in the bedroom with the door closed. No way.”

She crossed her arms and set her face. “If you think I’m letting you in my bedroom, you’re crazy.” But in the back of her head she paused, remembering we faced a telepath and teleporter. And that maybe, if all of the talk was true, I had a few skills to fight him. She still didn’t trust me.

“I’m
not leaving you
. If that means I sleep on your
floor, that’s what it means. I’ve slept on far worse than that, trust me. Even I can’t control the Inverse Square Law.”

Her eyebrows drew together. “The what?”

I sighed, dropped the blanket, and pulled my hands through my hair in exasperation. It had been a stressful night, damn it; I didn’t want to have to explain every little thing. “Telepathy obeys the laws of physics like everything else—unless something funky is going on, the farther away you are, the weaker the connection gets. That goes double if you’re not paying attention—and I’d like to get some sleep tonight if I can.”

“You’ll get plenty of sleep on the couch.” She was being stubborn on purpose. Whatever had made her wary before was still here now. I wished mind reading could help more at the moment, but she wasn’t really thinking, just reacting to whatever her latest deal was. I didn’t have time for this.

“Sure. I could sleep on the couch. But that would defeat the purpose of being here at all. Minding—mental bodyguarding—is not my specialty. It never was. The little bit of practice I do have is over a decade old. Honestly, I can’t sleep
and
watch
and
wake up immediately for anybody but me, not for sure. You get attacked thirty feet away—for real this time, through the window of your bedroom, say—I might sleep through it. If the back of my head doesn’t feel personally threatened.

“On the other hand, five feet away, three feet away, your presence is going to overlap me enough in Mindspace I’ll wake up automatically in self-defense. Fighting. If anything happens, we’re going to need my instincts working for us.”

She did
not
look happy; her wariness was overcoming her good sense. And her face said, bullshit, as she twisted her hair back with a pink rubber band. That was usually a move she did right before a physical fight. Or when she felt like fighting. It had been a long night with too much tension, and we were both on edge. Even so, I couldn’t afford to give in.

I met her eyes and took a wild guess. “I’m not trying to take advantage of you. I can do the floor, as long as it’s right next to the bed. I’ll do the floor, no problem. I’m just trying to keep you safe.”