Seers (5 page)

I’m looking directly at her now. We’re not setting up our supplies anymore. The rest of the class has settled in to their individual projects. Only a few murmurs can be heard coming from the back of the room. She stops fidgeting, sits forward, puts both elbows on the table, and rests her chin on her hands. Her eyes meet mine. She is looking for motive. Why is this new girl asking me to think about my life? Why should I tell her? What is she after?

I can feel her searching me. Searching my eyes. I don’t have to worry about what she will find. She’s making sure she is not being played with. Sometimes the most inquisitive people ask the deepest of questions to hear themselves ask them, or better yet, in the hopes that others around hear them ask thought-provoking questions and think,
What a deep person! I wish I were that smart.
You know how you spot those people? Watch their faces as you attempt to answer that deep question that made you excited, that made you think your intelligence was being respected in that very moment because someone wanted, really wanted, to know your innermost thoughts and beliefs. But the truth is they get off on the delivery alone. They ask questions like that to see the excited and magnetic response they can get from people. And when you answer them? You can actually see their eyes glaze over as they wait for you to finish talking, so they can ask or say something else that will bring them even more attention. She won’t find that on my face, in my eyes. I truly want to know her. I
need
to know her. And I can see that she believes me.

Eri furrows her brow and takes a deep breath. “No.”

“No, we can’t know something like that as we sit in the moment?”

“No. Not that. I think we know when we’re not getting all we can get from something,” she says in a hushed voice. Her eyes are soft. A deep brown like a fawn. “I mean, no, I’m not getting all that I can get from this place.”

This place?
Miss America just lost a point during the interview round. She also just became interesting. Let the game begin.

With a first, semi-successful connection made with Eri, I can officially kick-start this mission. Tobias says missions will help me piece together the years of my life that I have lost. The space around the few memories I have left is cloudy and thick. I try to wade through it, but I get all turned around inside my own head and end up right back where I started. Tobias says that’s why I have to be so careful. Probably why he’s so protective, always watching. Because I didn’t forget my past. Someone or something took my past, took my memories from me.

Tobias has provided me with as much information as he’s been able to gather. He reasons that whoever attacked my brain and stole my memories also planted a memory of the headquarters building, of his address. I don’t remember the day I showed up there. I own the memories from the day after my connection with Tobias until now. Except for the clear memory of my first Extraction, I see my memories through a gray haze, and some are filled with gaps and don’t make sense to me.

Tobias says that to have any hope of regaining my past, I must focus on missions. A Seer’s memory becomes more powerful as Navigational skills improve. And so each mission is more difficult. Tobias says it’s like training for cross-country. You build up to your longest distance over time. The hope is that over time and after more missions, I may gain a better view of the spaces around my remaining memories and in that space, maybe even find more.

Since I found Tobias, nearly a year ago, I have completed four missions. Sometimes the mission’s goal is to save, sometimes to defeat. Either way each mission is set up the same: enter an environment, form the necessary relationships, establish trust, gain entry, and Navigate to read or manipulate. Extract if necessary. My first mission was to gain entry into the aunt of a missing child. The family believed that this woman not only knew where the child was but was also responsible for her disappearance. They were right. For that mission I attended the high school of the aunt’s daughter, befriended her, and found out how she felt about her mother. Then I gained access into their home. During a dinner with her family, I went in.

Since that first mission, I have Navigated a teenager’s suicidal brother, an orphan to find clues as to how she became an orphan and if and where there were any living relatives, and the mother of a girl addicted to drugs. I don’t exactly pass out candy canes at Christmas or paint the rainbows after a storm, but at least sometimes the result of my Navigation is positive. Now the sister knows how to help her brother. The orphan knows she is alone in this world; she won’t waste her time wondering. And the mother will no longer see her daughter abuse herself with drugs because I found the layer of hurt that the mother had inflicted upon her daughter, and I took it.

My missions are always unique in that I have to form background knowledge in order to Navigate. Because I have to get to know the beings, each mission has its own backstory. If I wasn’t going in to retrieve or change something, I could go in cold. I could find out where my target was in that moment, show up there, make eye contact, and dive in. But what would I be looking for? What single memory would change lives in a way that would complete my mission? Other Seers can go in cold. They find information. They retrieve data. They cannot retrieve memories like I can. They’ve never Extracted a being from a layer of someone’s memory before. So their Preceptors dispatch them like officers on a raid. They go in, gather information, and get out.

Maybe that’s why I prefer undercover cop movies and detective shows to military or police-force action movies. I like the strategic plotting, the secret lives, the blurring of lines. The blurring of business and personal lines is tricky for me, though. How can I not become invested in my beings?

Tobias says it will get easier for me to detach from my mission once it’s over. But right now I still think about what happened to that little girl and get goose bumps. I still worry about the brother. He is still alive, isn’t he? Did I do enough? Is my orphan strong enough to go through this world alone? And my last girl. My age. Beautiful. Graceful. Sweet. So sensitive. So twisted. Her mother should have stopped pushing her, should have stopped criticizing her after my Extraction. Did I do enough to get her to stop torturing herself? Enough to get her to stop punishing herself?

Tobias has heard tell of only one other Seer like me, or actually, only one other Extractor, as I am called. I guess that’s why I am paired with him; he’s the only one who seems to have answers for me. Other Seers avoid me or look at me like they are either in awe of me or hate me because I make their awesome abilities seem second-rate. If I try to ask other Preceptors even the simplest of questions, it’s always the same reply, “Ask Tobias.”

On my first meeting for this mission, I learned the background on Miss Eri Kuono. Eri Kuono is the daughter of Marjorie and Arashi Kuono. Marjorie met Arashi while spending a year in Japan as a part of a Global Links learning abroad program. She was furthering her cultural studies as she worked toward becoming a translator and linguist. Arashi was completing his degree in neuroscience. When the year was up, they returned to the United States together. They married shortly after, pursued their careers, and had Eri four years into their marriage.

Marjorie has enjoyed unparalleled success in her field. Arashi’s breakthroughs in neuroscience have been praised and acclaimed. Eri is bright, no doubt. Alsinboro Academy bright. You can’t be a slouch in the intellect department and be accepted there. But she is not achieving to the level that is expected of her. Apparently this is a source of dissension in the house. Arashi is distracted. He has pulled back from his latest project to focus more direct attention on the potential successes of his only child.

Hence the mission. Tobias was contacted. Apparently the Seers are awaiting Dr. Kuono’s newest breakthrough in neuroscience. I am to win Eri’s confidence, uncover what lies at the center of her “lack of drive and inability to work to her known potential,” and then Navigate Dr. Kuono. It is believed that the key to her discontent lies in his overbearing nature. If I can Extract a memory from Dr. Kuono, one that is at the center of his need for Eri to be as successful as he and his wife are, he may be able to accept her as she is, relax about what she will accomplish in the future, and get his focus back on work.

In today’s meeting I report on the status of my relationship with Eri. In other words I recount our lone conversation. Tobias is pleased with the contact but stresses the need to form a deeper connection while I am still “the new girl.” Being new carries an obvious appeal. My classmates will feel me out and see what group I settle down with. And then they will label me and feel that all is right with the world. School is like the post office that way. All mail sorted according to zip code. All packages weighed and stacked in piles, piles that will never again be together in one great mass as they were when they came in. We might all start as a batch of blubbering kindergartners and go out attached to a year as one graduating class, but all the time in between is spent in sliced-off divisions of sameness. Skaters together? Check. Future starving artists together? Check. The beautiful popular crowd in the VIP section? Check. And no matter my tastes or comfort zone, my group is a clear choice. Eri’s group.

Tobias provides me more background information on Eri’s group.

“They are the overachievers,” he starts. “Luke Brewer is her main companion. I originally believed them to be a couple, but it seems they are platonic. Luke is a newer student to Alsinboro Academy. He transferred in last year after two years at a private academy for boys in Boston. Daisy Underwood is the daughter of the most affluent family in Preston. Her parents are both surgeons and work at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, here in the city. Eri’s parents seem to tolerate the presence of Luke but foster her friendship with Daisy. Whom she spends her time with seems of particular interest to them.”

Great. So I may have to sell myself to her parents if I want to spend any real time with her. It’s fortunate for me that Tobias leaves no loose ends when preparing my background information and credentials. At least I know her parents will find my pedigree acceptable.

Supposedly I spent my freshman year abroad, studying in England at a Cambridge preparatory school for young writers. I spent my sophomore and junior years in New Hampshire with an aunt, splitting my time between tutors and taking classes at an all-girls institution that primes young ladies for Ivy League educations and careers that will ensure there is no shortage of women in leadership and power-heavy roles in business.

In reality I have spent the last year traveling into brains and taking memories from them. I have been living in a two-room apartment above the building Tobias owns, which is also a location headquarters for Seers. Before that? I have no idea. Would that be acceptable to Dr. and Mrs. Kuono? A girl with a strange ability to raid brains but with no power over the memories in her own? I’m going to have to trick myself into believing that I can hang with their crowd, that I belong in their elite world of success and riches. The only thing I know I can match is their intellect. I’ll just have to focus on that in order to drum up my confidence.

“There’s also Patrick Crown. Track star and crew captain. And Frances Nelson. She holds the record for youngest female to have achieved a perfect score on the SATs and will surely be the academy’s valedictorian.”

Uh, okay. Maybe
match their intellect
was a bit assuming. I’ll just try to keep up.

“Be sure to secure an invitation into her home before next week,” he says as he swivels his chair back to his four computers and data table. I am being dismissed.

Sure, Tobias. Piece of cake.

The next morning I make my commute in twenty-six minutes. No traffic over the bridge, a speedy trip down 295 South. I pull into the parking lot a little early. There are cars scattered here and there, a Beamer, a bunch of Mercedes, a few domestic cars. And then my fire-engine red Dodge Dakota SLT Crew Cab. It stands out like a boiled lobster on a bed of rice. I will make no apologies for my truck, though. I love that truck. With my fire-licked hair, I never blend in anyway.