Mind Games (37 page)

I have this horrible thought: what if Otto actually has vein star risk factors? “Otto—”

“I know I must sound melodramatic.”

“What’s going on, Otto? What’s the cranial pressure? I need to know. Do you have special risk factors or preconditions?” The night flowers stir in the balmy breeze as I rub my palm in a circle on his back. The moment stretches long. He closes his eyes.

I’m really worried now. The fact that he’s been frightened of the disease since boyhood certainly doesn’t make him immune to it. It is potentially hereditary, after all! And now I’ve destabilized him with fear. “Otto, tell me!” His silence panics me. What if he has it? What have I done?

“All I can say, Justine, is that I do extra things with my mind. I carry out certain mental processes that cause cranial strain.”

“What does that mean?”

He shakes his head. “Extra brain activity, that’s all.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m getting the picture now: he’s hooked his highcap status to his hypochondria, like it makes him especially susceptible. I’d do the same thing in his place. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me,” I say sternly. He wants to open up to me; I can feel it. And I really want him to. It’ll be easier to destabilize him if I can talk about his status as a highcap. “Consider it nurse-patient privilege.”

He shakes his head.

“I know you’re not talking about doing lots of crossword puzzles, Otto. Extra cranial pressure? You know what that makes me think?”

He’s silent. I feel his anxiety deepen as I fight the inappropriate urge to pull him back into the pool. “Let me suggest a hypothetical situation,” I say. “Let’s say somebody is a highcap.”

He looks at me guardedly. He doesn’t deny it. He wants me to continue. I do.

“Many medical professionals, myself among them, accept it as fact that some people have increased mental capacity that give rise to certain abilities. It sounds like that’s what you’re getting at. So let’s say that person believes exercising his power makes him vulnerable to vein stars. Of course he can’t exactly tell a doctor because of his position in society.”

He watches me—debating, it seems. And then he says, “A person in that situation would lose everything, no matter what good he’d done.” A pause, then, “How would you advise this person?”

“I’d need to know more.”

“God help me. I barely even know you.”

“You know me.”

He takes a deep breath. “I have what’s called a gift for structural interface.”

“I’m familiar with that.” I repeat a bit of the knowledge
I’ve gathered. It seems to comfort Otto that I know so much.

“Most people consider us flakes, delusionals, or evil mutants with dangerous powers. One highcap can lift objects with his mind, another can invade dreams, or perhaps has partial psychic gifts. I can interface with structure.” He watches my face, worried, I guess, that I’ll find all this repellent. I’m just shocked he’s telling me. But of course he feels inexplicably bonded to me. I spelunked him; I was inside him. All my fear is still in him. So of course he feels like we’re close.

I find myself wishing it was more than that. I touch a soft, damp lock of hair.

He continues, “What regular humans don’t yet understand is how fantastically dangerous highcaps can be when they turn violent. When enough go violent at once, they threaten the very fabric of society. Human prisons simply aren’t built for highcaps. Most escapes you hear about are criminal highcaps.” He touches his head. “Which brings me to my risk factor. I’ve been using my powers of structural interface to seal violent highcaps away from each other and from society. You could say, Justine, that I’m single-handedly holding a population of dangerous criminals at bay with my mind. Maintaining the number of force fields I am, it’s straining the integrity of my blood vessels, I’m sure of it. I can feel it!”

“You seal away violent highcaps?”

“I keep them in apartments, warehouses, coat-check stalls, wherever I feel they won’t be a threat. What do you think? Wouldn’t that aggravate a vein star?”

I can’t breathe. “Is it always dangerous highcaps that you imprison? Because they hurt people?”

“Of course. I have no choice, Justine. At first I sealed up the major underworld crime bosses who were undermining law and order. But in the past few years, a new,
truly violent crop of highcap criminals has emerged, and I’ve had to seal up so many, I can barely keep track. Do you know what the crime wave would be like if I wasn’t doing this? The one doing all the brick kills? Highcap telekinetic. I sealed him up in an old warehouse.”

“I thought he killed himself.”

“No. Sophia made the witness remember it that way. She’s a revisionist—”

“Sophia? Your assistant?”

“I shouldn’t have told you that. Please—”

“Don’t worry.”

Silence. He regrets telling me about Sophia; I really have weakened him. “The problem is, I’d always seen this as a short-term solution, but now I can barely hold them all. I’m nearing a kind of tipping point. If I seal up any more, there’s a chance I’ll lose my control of all the force fields and they’d vanish, freeing my prisoners all at once. But the violence is mounting. At this point I can only seal in the most dangerous ones. As police chief, it’s up to me to keep the citizenry safe. So I seal up another highcap, then another. It seems like exactly the thing that could cause a vein star blowout, wouldn’t you agree?”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Do you think that’s significant?”

“Very.”

“A little over eight years.”

“And you started with just a few? The underworld bosses?”

“One. And his lieutenant. That solved the problem until the violent ones came along. Now I’m keeping so many in different places, sometimes I feel like it’s ripping my head apart.”

Packard, I think. And Diesel. I swallow. It’s like my entire universe got flipped when I wasn’t looking. Or is this an elaborate trick?

He says, “If I were to die, Justine, all those highcaps would be sealed in forever. A mass death sentence, and that’s not fair. They are my people, after all. I set up various systems and helpers to get food and water deliveries to them, but I don’t always know if that works out, and if I died … God, what kind of monster am I to pass these sentences? But if I had some sort of breakdown, or if I dissolved my force fields voluntarily to relieve vascular pressure and save my own life, I guarantee you that this city would descend into an uncontrollable bloodbath. There are too many of them pent up for too long, and all so angry. My brothers and sisters on the force would not survive the carnage.”

The pain in his brown eyes is deep as the night. I see him and I feel him so strongly.

“My motto is to guard the citizens from evildoers of every kind, and I’ll die doing it, even if my soul is damned to hell for bringing all those highcaps down with me. Please give me your word of honor, Justine, that after I die, you won’t reveal my secret.”

I’m stunned. “Of course not,” I whisper. I think about the pictures of Otto in disguises, shadowy meetings. Is this what it was? Otto maintaining his personal penal system? What about the man with the gouged eyes? But then, why would a man with Otto’s powers of force fields need to use his thumbs to kill? Or a vise? And if he’s such a brutal killer, why put himself out to imprison anybody?

“It’s easy to say you’ll die for a thing, Justine, but it’s not easy when you’re facing that death. In moments of weakness, I think, Why not just release them and fight them all over again? Because I don’t want to die.” He touches my cheek, and my pulse pounds. “Especially not now.”

I’m filled with crazy, huge emotions, and I don’t know if I can trust them. Is he toying with me? Is this the
truth? I wish suddenly I could put the world into a holding pattern, just freeze everybody and everything until I figure out who is lying. Is it Otto or Packard? I think back on my impressions when I was spelunking him—I’d sensed order, honesty, sincerity. Can I trust that?

“Is that why you traveled the world? To learn how to seal criminals?”

“Not at first. As a boy, I used my powers in dark, dark ways. My trek around the world, it was really about running from myself. If I could’ve shed my entire being—as a snake sheds his skin—I would’ve. My mentor helped me to stop running, to turn my powers to good.”

I stare at him stupidly.

“You must agree I’m doomed or you would’ve said something.”

Right there and then, I decide to pull Otto out of the attack. I need time. I can always put him in later. I tighten my towel around me and grasp his biceps, looking him square in the eyes. “No, I don’t agree. Listen to me, Otto—you do not have a vein star leak or significant expansion, and do you know how I know?”

“You
don’t
agree?”

“Number one, lack of pinpoint pain. Your only pain is your bump, right? And that’s not pinpoint.”

“Well—”

“Right or wrong?”

He furrows his brow. “It’s sort of pinpoint.”

I shake my head.
“Sort of
means it’s not. Two, your color. You have good healthy color. If you had been bleeding internally since you bumped your head, you’d be pale. Three—I do recall your telling me you’ve been frightened of vein stars since boyhood. You had a fear of vein stars then, but you weren’t holding prisoners at that time. As a former detective, tell me, doesn’t a cause
usually
precede
the thing it causes, rather than coming after?”

“I don’t know. …”

“Who’s the nurse here?”

“You are.”

“That’s right. And here’s the most important thing for you to understand: veins are the plumbing. Mental energy is the electricity. It’s not the same system. You can have all the electrical overload in the world and it won’t affect your plumbing.” I don’t have any scientific or medical proof for what I just said, but it seems like it would be true.

The relief that spreads over his face is incredible. “Are you sure of that?”

“Think about it.”

“I guess, but …” He looks away, falls silent.

“Stop it! I know what you’re doing. You’re analyzing the sensations in your head.” I sit on his lap and grip his shoulders.
Concentrate!
I think. “Otto, if you focus on your head, you’ll just cause sensation.” He’s not hearing me; he’s too charged up with my fear. “Look, let’s talk about something else. I need to understand more about these guys you sealed up. How can you be sure they deserved it? Is it possible you sealed up some that were harmless?”

Otto shakes his head. “I’m always sure.”

“You can actually seal them away with your mind?”

“It’s not as though I can do it remotely. I have to be there in person to create the force field. And I have to brand it, in a way, to set it. Though I could release them all remotely.” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that, if I decided to.”

Or if you were disillusioned, I think. “I don’t understand this brand thing.”

“The brand sets it. The brand is of my visage from when I was in Vindahar.”

“Your visage? Like a picture of you?”

“It appears wherever I seal somebody. Me with the beard, the hair …”

This is what I needed, but I have to be very careful. I look away, as though something is coming to me. “Oh my God. That one restaurant—that Mongolian place. That door. Is that you? That door?”

He smiles. He’s a little bit proud of it all, I realize, behind everything else. Every master wants an audience. “My first. The brands got less elaborate after that.”

I bite my lip, trying to get my expression under control. “Do you have a dangerous one in there?”

“He was the original highcap boss. A diabolically gifted leader.”

“So he’s, like, the worst of all?”

“In a scenario where I released control and set my criminals free, this one would eventually rise to the top and lead them.”

“And he’s a killer?”

Otto laughs bitterly. “He controls the killers. I’ve known him since boyhood. We were friends once, struggling to survive, but things went out of control. There was so much I didn’t understand—I was quite young, really, though that’s no excuse. We fought, but I wasn’t strong enough …”

“Why did you fight?”

Otto shakes his head. “I don’t talk about that.”

Neither does Packard.

“My point is that when I returned from Vindahar and discovered he was a far more devious criminal than when I left, I gave him a chance to turn his life around. When he refused, I put him away. This man is the only one of my prisoners who knows it’s me who trapped him. He deserved that much.” He looks down at his knees. “In another life, he could have made a brilliant psychologist. I left him with access to regular humans,
hoping he’d use his gifts in a positive way. Back then, I had certain notions about reform.”

“And?”

“Who knows? I’ve been meaning to check for years, but I’ve become so overwhelmed with the task of keeping the citizens safe and beating back the crime wave I haven’t gotten to it. Honestly, I’m lucky at this point just to get through the day without—” He pauses, tilts his head as though he hears something.

This all has the very upsetting feel of truth. Am I unwittingly working to release Packard along with hordes of violent criminals? Or is Otto toying with me as Packard warned he would? Could Otto be that sophisticated?

“Justine!” He moves his head from side to side. “It’s gone!”

“What?”

“The pain, the sensation. I’m still aware of an unsettling knot of fear, but that’s it.” He clutches my arms. “You got me out of it.”

And I could put you right back in, I think, but I just nod. Otto tests his head some more.

I stand, tighten the towel around my chest, and wander off to a nearby flower bed, as if I’m drawn to examine some blooms. One of these men is lying, and either way, I’m in trouble. If Packard’s lying and he really is this criminal, that’s a problem because my sanity and my life depend on zinging, which depends on Packard. All the disillusionists’ lives depend on Packard. Not to mention the pain of so huge a betrayal.

If Otto’s the one who is lying, it means he’s been toying with me, and that he knows exactly what I’m up to. It means everything he said about his deep connection to me isn’t real. It also means I’ll probably wind up like Packard. Or Diesel.