Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (34 page)

“If you had a knife, why didn’t you use it on those guys?”

“You try getting a concealed knife out of a tight boot in the middle of a fistfight. Go ahead, try. Then come back and criticize my decisions. Go ahead.”

“You’re getting cranky,” I told her. “Give me five minutes.” I showed her my old memory of this place, more than fifteen years old, from when I’d been a student trying to specialize in tuning. That hadn’t worked out so well—I’d hated the teachers, and the subject matter wasn’t nearly as interesting as it sounded—but I’d been here, at Toppenguild, for over a year. There should be labs on this floor, and one of them had a cut-through to the pyro training room.

The training room was two feet thick of concrete on all sides, with a door that could barricade from either
inside or out. The pyros were terrifying while training; that room was reinforced enough to hold a rampaging elephant. From either side. It was exactly what we needed now.

“We’ll get you to that room,” I said, shifting her for a better hold. “You could hold it against an army in the physical world while I go after Bradley in Mindspace.”

Her head came up. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Someone’s coming,” she hissed. “Put me down.”

I ignored her and dropped into Mindspace. And pulled out just as quick, trying to cover my tracks, trying to minimize my own presence, shore up my own shields. There was a telepath coming, one frighteningly strong, and I’d bet anything it was Bradley. He made ripples in the very fabric of Mindspace just by moving—I wasn’t looking forward to facing him, not on terms we couldn’t control. We needed that practice room, and the gadgets they kept inside. Did they still use flamethrowers?

“Hang on,” I told Cherabino. I ran toward the lab I remembered, her weight nearly overbalancing me. She made little pain sounds every time my stride hit the floor, hard. I didn’t have time to be gentle, and I wasn’t very good at the running-while-carrying-the-girl thing yet. She hung on as best she could and complained in a steady, quiet stream.

I came to a stop at the beginning of the blue-painted science hall. A framed picture of Space Station Freedom shared space with a blueprint of a genetically engineered ferret from Thailand. We didn’t have far to go, maybe two hundred feet down the hall of doors. I kept the image of that flamethrower in my mind.

I set Cherabino down, settling her on the good foot.
“You think you can climb up on my back? The balance would be better. If we can just get to the practice room…”

“I’m not an invalid.” She strode forward, every step a shooting pain. She’d taken the location of the lab from my mind.

I made a disgusted sound and hurried to catch up. Behind us, the huge presence that was Bradley came slowly closer. Even through my shields, I could feel the disturbance in Mindspace, like a huge ship’s prow pushing the water aside. I’d never felt anything like it.

Then it disappeared, and a chill ran up my back. Carefully, carefully I thinned my shields. He was still there, still huge, but he had stopped, cold, right next to a much smaller presence. Maybe he was talking. Closer to me, a few rooms away to my left, something felt wrong, disturbed, but I didn’t dare thin my shields any more to see what it was. Bradley was the threat. I don’t think he’d seen me. But I was out of time; the waves of his movement hit the edges of my shields.

I pulled back into myself with a painful lurch, shoring up my shields again with an effort that almost made me bleed. I couldn’t do that again, or he would see me.

I opened my eyes and fought double vision. Finally I resolved Cherabino standing ten yards in front of me. She was in front of the door to the lab, gesturing impatiently. Her eyes widened. Behind me I heard a gasp, a clatter.

I turned. A nurse and a hulking bodyguard had just rounded the corner. The redheaded nurse, in full scrubs, was pale, her mouth open in shock, her hands out. A metal tray was on the floor, instruments strewn. The bodyguard went for a gun at his hip.

There was no way I could run to Cherabino in time.
No choice. I reached out—shields straining nearly to breaking. The barrel of the gun came up. My mind slowly enveloped his unshielded thoughts. The gun paused halfway.

Our wills battled, him to pull the gun up, to pull the trigger, me to stop him cold. He was strong for a normal, strong-willed. Probably why he got hired in the first place.

The nurse ran, gasping, down the hall in the other direction, and I couldn’t stop her. Finally my grip on the guard was strong enough—I found the right place in his brain and pushed. He fell over.

The sound of shuffling footsteps came to my right.

“Did you kill him?” Cherabino’s voice strained.

I weaved a little on my feet, head pounding, pain hitting in waves. I would get this under control. I had to.

“Are you okay?” Cherabino asked, getting the edge of it.

I shook, and held, and held. I finally was stable, but there was Bradley, coming down the hallway, still around the corner, still a hundred feet away, but closing far too fast.

“We need to go,” I told her.

I lurched down the hallway, grabbing Cherabino’s jacket and pulling her along. I was disoriented, under pressure, and I knew if we didn’t make it to the room to regroup I might fall apart. I might die, unable to fight back. Taking her with me.

She doubled her steps, trying to keep up, and the
stab, stab, stab
of the pain of her foot echoed in my head like a bad rock song on stadium speakers. “Did you kill him?” she repeated in a small voice.

“No,” I said. I didn’t kill people with my mind. “He’s asleep. Hurry up.”

I could feel Bradley’s wake behind me getting closer, and closer. I had his attention now.

Fifteen feet from the lab door. Ten. Five.

“Stop!” a man’s voice called out in booming tones.

Bradley had arrived.

Cherabino’s hand
touched the doorknob.

“Go,” I told her, and turned around. I heard the door open and backed up, slowly, toward it. At least she’d get away, even if I didn’t.

Bradley looked just like he did in the picture, just like he did in the vision, a skinny, pasty geek with tortoiseshell glasses and a small sneer.

“You! You weren’t supposed to get here until later,” he told me, in the tone you’d use on an old friend who had just kicked your dog. “Always ruining everything. The girl was supposed to keep you busy.” In Mindspace, he was huge, far larger than I’d thought him to be, a dark blimp with rough edges. In the real world, the fluorescent lights glinted off his glasses ominously.

“You know she’s a cop,” I said, taking a small step back. “You have to know it’s dumb to kidnap a cop.”

“She was yours. You hit me where it hurt, I did the same. It’s only fair.” He moved forward, measured paces, seemingly in no hurry. I inched back, counting on my peripheral vision to tell me when I’d gone far enough. His harmless-looking body just made his looming presence in Mindspace that much more terrible.

The next logical question was, how in hell had I hurt him, but that seemed like the kind of thing that would
get the bad guy mad, and I was a big proponent of talk now, fight later. Especially when fighting later would give me more weapons. My mind kept going back to the flamethrower—maybe they’d left it in the training room again. They’d done that all the time when I was here.

I took another small step back. “Why is this so damn personal?” Oops, probably not the right tone to keep him from getting angry.

He frowned, hard, then laughed with a bitter edge. “You don’t remember.”

I thought about using the strong-drugs excuse, but I took the higher road. “No. I’m sorry.”

He made a disgusted sound. “All the girls. All the money. All the accolades. And Golden Boy doesn’t even remember the research fellow who’s going to kill him. Tragic.”

“I heard you made head of the department,” I said. “Congratulations. Really. Is that where you found the machines?” I backed up faster.

His glasses glinted like the carapace of a bug. “Think you’re so clever, just because you’re a professor. I left the machines. You made me, you and the cops. Think it will stop me. But you don’t know everything. I have the blueprints, and they’ll make me better ones.”

“Who will make you better ones?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed, and he held up a hand, palm out. “I’m done talking now.”

Overwhelming force threw me back, past the doorway. I landed on the floor, seeing stars.

In front of me the door opened and a glass container flew through the air. Bradley ducked as glass broke in front of him. He hissed in pain, cradled his eye, screamed out names. Reinforcements—he was calling reinforcements.

“Take that, teep!” Cherabino yelled. She grabbed my ankle, pulled. What?

She pulled again. “Help me out.”

I pushed with my hands, my body halfway into the door. Another push, my vision still blurry. I sat up, got to my hands and knees.

Down the hallway, Bradley rubbed at his eye while another big guy came up behind him. Much farther down the hall, the first guard slept on, oblivious. He’d be out for at least another hour.

I was not so lucky. Pulling myself up, I grappled with the heavy steel door until it closed, locking it with the one small deadbolt I had available. My eyes finally focused, but the back of my head was throbbing in time with my heartbeat.

“What was in the beaker?” I asked Cherabino.

“Baking soda and water. Everything else is locked up. Unless we can figure out a way to throw lit propane, all that’s here is glass, baking soda, and water. Maybe some salt.”

I looked around, panting. We were in the middle of a chemistry lab full of low black tables, tables covered in beakers, tubing, gas burners, and jars. The smell of chemicals, glass, and burnt wood permeated the room. I saw a couple boxes of that baking soda, some salt, sand, even a few pipettes. But she was right, no chemicals were out, not even a plain acid.

At the end of the room was the solid wooden door I wanted, less than twenty feet away. Bad design to make it wood, but maybe there was another steel door on the inside. Regardless, we needed to get out of here and into the pyro practice room, now. I did not want to be in a room full of glass and propane lines with a telekinetic on the loose.

On the floor, Cherabino held her ankle. “Damn foot.”

“We’re out of time. I’m carrying you.”

“No you’re not.” Her expression was firm as she reached up to grab a table.

“Fine.” I stood up myself. “At least pull out that knife of yours. The door won’t hold him for long.” I paused. “This is the part where the nasty stuff starts flying around. The real world, yeah, but also Mindspace. Hide under a table if you have to, do the same in your mind. Distract him in the real world if you can.”

“Got it,” she said, leaning against the table with a determined expression. “Get going.”

A
thud
came from the door.

I limped to the next student table, turned it over quickly, violently. Glass beakers crashed against the floor on the other side, metal tinkling, rubber thudding. I got my hands under the side of the table and lifted, using every muscle in my back to keep the bulky table moving.

“You might want to move,” I told Cherabino. Then I yanked the table over in front of the door, bracing it against a vibration I could feel in my bones. That should buy us a few seconds at least.

“You okay?” I asked her. She looked pained and was already limping to the center aisle, knife in one hand.

“I’m fine. Get that door open.”

I staggered past her, through eight rows of chemistry tables, all the way to the front teacher’s station. The chalkboard at the front of the room was emblazoned with the words
Safety First
. My equilibrium was going, but I got my hand on the doorknob to the door next to it. Another crash came from the hallway.

Cherabino was almost halfway down the aisles, a
steady stream of pain and cursing accompanying every step.

I turned the knob. It was locked. “Damn it.”

Another crash, and a low, tortured hum from the hallway. The table bracing the door started to shake visibly. I looked around, heart pounding. There on the teacher’s desk. A couple of very long thin pieces of metal—sharp flat thermometers. The top edge of them would work nicely. I’d learned a few things on the streets; I could pick an easy lock if my life depended on it. It might now.

There was a long silence from the door, while I felt ripples in Mindspace. I grabbed the thin metal thermometers and fed them carefully into the lock, hoping they’d fit. Yes. I moved them around with shaking hands…. I had to do this; I had to….

A click. The steel door from the hallway made an awful sound. The table was splintering, the hard steel of the hallway door was stretching, straining like a bubble inward, cracking the table. It wouldn’t be much longer. I turned the knob—

Only to come face-to-face with five shelves of bottles and a tangle of beakers. I stared, adrenaline pumping, not able to understand what I was seeing. Shelves? Sulfuric acid? Beakers? Magnesium? Sodium? A bag of sand? This couldn’t be right. I reached out a hand through the bottles—the back wall was solid. A closet. A chemistry supply closet.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

“What’s wrong?” Cherabino said in a pained voice. “Why aren’t you going through?”

“It’s not the cut-through,” I said. “We’re in the wrong room.”

There was no way out. None but the door to the hallway that was even now about to break. We would
be stuck in a chem lab with a telekinetic who could throw all the nice sharp glass objects directly at our heads. I hit my head on the shelf.

While Cherabino cursed, I tried to think, tried to make my brain work while a truly nasty scraping sound came from the door. My eyes ran over the bottles, clear glass the length of my arm with black stoppers and handwritten labels. My eye went back to the magnesium, the little jar with the dull gray metal strips.

One of the professors at the Guild liked to do demos with that stuff—it burned. Hot. With a really bright light that was dangerous to look at. I grabbed the bottle, shut the door. I didn’t want anyone else to see the chemicals and use them against us.