The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (4 page)

“Don’t worry, I’m not a sapient
specialist.” He spread my arms, inspecting me as if I were a favorite niece he
hadn’t seen in years. “Cleo, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“Literally?” I tugged my hands.
“I make your eyes feel better?” No mask accompanied his words.

“Certainly my spirits.”

I tugged again, but the old man’s
grip was like too-tight shoes. From Wal-Mart. “Can you let go now?”

“Sorry. I’m clinging like a vine
and we haven’t been introduced.” He dropped my hands without the slightest show
of embarrassment. “I’m Yuri Kratochvil, head of YuriCorp.”

I eyed the old man. He looked
harmless, but he was the boss. The chief. The Charles Xavier. “You named your
company after yourself. Isn’t that a little egotistical?”

“My given name was Bert. I named
myself after the company when I took over.”

“If you say so, Mr. Kratochvil.”
I squinted, and sure enough, a glimmer danced around him.

Yuri chuckled. “Please, call me
Yuri. Can’t get one past you, Cleo. Which is why you’re here.”

“I thought I was here because
your employees dragged me away from my apartment.” I sat in one of the chairs
near his desk without being invited. The shoes they’d given me pinched.

Yuri, instead of claiming his
executive throne, took the peon chair next to me. He leaned back and stuck out
his legs. His skinny ankles were sockless, and he was wearing garden clogs with
his nice suit.

“Al, can you get Samantha for
me?” he asked. “We might need her.”

Al left. John remained beside the
door and leaned against the wall. I was shocked to see a frown on his face.
Okay, not really. At some point his face must have frozen like that, proving
millions of mothers right.

“Coffee?” Yuri indicated a pot
nearly hidden by a bushy plant.

“No, thanks.” They could have
dosed it with some drug to make me compliant.

“How about you, John?”

“I had tea this morning.”

I presume he’d had his caffeine
after they’d left me in the secret room to fret, gnash my teeth and, you know,
nap.

Yuri pointed at the chair beside
the coffeepot. “Don’t loom over us like a sequoia, son. Have a seat. Al will
make sure we aren’t disturbed.”

John had just settled into the
pleather chair when Samantha entered.

“Hey, Pop-Pop.” She inclining her
head in greeting. “We’re ready?”

Pop-Pop was an interesting
nickname for her boss.

“Didn’t I mention?” she said when
she saw my expression. “Yuri’s my grandfather.” She came to stand beside me
and, of all things, clasped my hand where it rested on the chair’s arm.

“Excuse me.” I shoved my hands
into my lap. What was with these people, touching all the time?

“It’s for your own good.”
Samantha rested a palm on my shoulder. Could she affect me through the cheap
polyester blend of my black suit jacket? “It’s a safety precaution. Protocol.”

“In every office I know, people
are supposed to keep their hands to themselves.” Which didn’t mean people did,
especially not on the sly, but I didn’t want Miss Pusher influencing my mood
swings. Perhaps being the granddaughter of the boss gave her a certain leeway.

Positioned behind me, Samantha
tightened her grip. I didn’t feel warm tinglies or a suspicious change of
attitude, so I resisted the urge to smack her hand. In a voice that sounded
calculatedly pleasant to my ears, she said, “Let’s just say we’ve had incidents
when we introduced ourselves to a new suprasensor. The truth is not always
comforting.”

“I already know the truth, and I
don’t want to be touched. Or pushed. Or eavesdropped on. Or licked and
smelled.” I glanced at John, but he was watching Yuri.

“Your abilities create an
interesting challenge keeping things hidden from you until the appropriate
time,” Yuri acknowledged. He twiddled his fingers in his lap as if thumb
wrestling himself. “Sometimes a new supra knows there are others when we bring
her in, but sometimes she’s newly made, a little bean sprout. It’s rare that
she’s been flying solo all her life, as you have. The revelation can be
unnerving. Samantha assures nobody panics.”

“I’m fine.” I wouldn’t wig unless
they described the painful scientific experiments they had slated for me. Then
what would I do? My mutant powers didn’t lend themselves to combat.

Yuri met my eyes so I had to
focus on his face or be rude. While I didn’t mind being rude, and in fact had
been known to make a habit of it, watching someone’s face was the best way to
gauge honesty.

“Cleo, there are thousands of
individuals in the world capable of using their senses more adroitly than the
average human. Actually, there are more, but only a percentage are abled to the
extent it makes a difference in their daily activities.”

Thousands of people like me? “If
that many people could do things like see lies and smell DNA, it would show up
on the Internet. Maybe even CNN.”

“Thousands of people have a minor
suprasense. It surfaces in a variety of ways, many of which are acknowledged by
our society as normal.”

“Or nearly normal,” Samantha
added.

“Artists and creative types are
examples,” Yuri explained. “Also, people with acute senses used in common ways,
such as wine tasters or perfume noses.”

I myself wasn’t over-fond of
wine, or any alcoholic beverage, unless it was mixed with mushrooms and
chicken. When I was drunk, it was a lot harder to keep my mouth shut after
people lied to my face. “How does wine tasting turn into seeing lies?”

“It doesn’t, though I suppose
there could be a suprasensor who could taste lies. John tells me your ability
seems to be a combination of vision, touch and hearing. Having acuity in three
senses is incredible, Cleo. You’re as rare as a ghost orchid.”

“You said there were thousands of
people like me.” Even among mutants I was the freak. How fair was that?

“Thousands of suprasensors. Most
have a single heightened sense. Taste and smell are linked and often considered
a unit.”

Samantha’s hand on my shoulder
was like a lead weight. A bomb waiting to drop. “Does anyone,” I asked, “have
the ability to run faster than a speeding bullet or never get wrinkles?”

Yuri laughed. “Not that we’ve
discovered. The supra abilities we’ve registered so far spring from the central
nervous system—the five senses—and the connections our synapses and neural
network make when processing input from the world around us. What it boils down
to is some of us are able to exploit a great deal more information than others.
It’s that simple.”

“Like cats can hear the crinkle
of the treat bag from anywhere?” I asked.

“That’s one way to look at it.
Some touch sensors like my granddaughter function more assertively and can
influence hormones and neural responses in others.”

As Yuri talked, I grew less
anxious. What he was saying made sense. All people are different, right? Why
wouldn’t brains connect in different ways? Why would everyone’s noses and eyes
and skin work exactly the same way?

 “Take you, for instance. Your
suprasenses give you the ability to detect when someone’s lying. It’s a known
fact people exhibit physiologically during deceptive behavior. Your senses
distinguish these reactions, and your brain translates them into a visual
image. What you can do is brilliant and precious.”

“John told the receptionist I was
a chameleon. Is that what you call people like me?”

“No, a chameleon is someone who
can be overlooked. We’ve been assuming you have this secondary ability because
you escaped notice so long. A chameleon’s skin releases chemicals that cause
others to view him as so unthreatening, they cease to notice him.”

“That explains why I was such a
wallflower at all those high school dances,” I said, when the fact was, I’d
never gone to dances. You needed a date for that. The lies of high school boys,
when you’re a high school girl, are tantamount to the end of the world.

“Chameleoning one of the least
understood abilities, but it’s common, as these things go. When a person has
more than one skill, the second is generally chameleon. But let’s concentrate
on what we know for certain.” Yuri leaned toward me, his wrinkles pulling
themselves into lines of interest. “Why don’t you describe your ability, Cleo?”

Was it safe to talk to these
people? I wanted to. I wanted to with an urgency I’d never experienced, not
even when I thought my ill-gained knowledge could help somebody. I wanted to
tell them everything—how much I hated it, how much it had made my life a living
hell.

“Half the time I can’t see people
clearly. Isn’t that ironic?” I said. “So many people are dishonest. When they
lie, I see an aura around their face, like a mask. Sometimes I can even
see...this will sound crazy...”

“It won’t,” Yuri assured me with
a smile. He had beautiful teeth.

“Sometimes I can see lips on the
mask saying different words than the person is saying.” I paused. “I taught
myself to read lips.”

“What do the masks tell you?”
Samantha asked.

She made it sound as if she were
asking what the voices told me. I wriggled my shoulder and she released me.

“The mask tells me the truth.” I
crossed my arms. “I see it more the older I get. I’m becoming wise to the ways
of liars and men.”

“Much more reliable than a
polygraph,” Yuri concluded with great satisfaction.

“If she thinks she knows the
truth, her brain could play tricks on her,” Samantha said.

“It’s no trick.” I’d had ample
opportunity to refute that notion when I came up with it myself. Mask reading
had proven right time and again. “Do you think I want to be this way? Do you realize
how hard it is to get through a typical day when everybody around you lies?”

Yuri patted my knee, and I forced
myself not to twitch. “Don’t ever regret what you can do, Cleo. It’s a gift.”

“It doesn’t feel like one.” I
rebounded a little with Yuri’s understanding. “Especially not when I see things
I don’t want to see.”

“What if you’re blindfolded? Or
in a dark room?” John tapped his finger to his lips, a frown creasing his
forehead. I’d just shared my deepest wound with them, and instead of commiserating
about my hard life, Mr. Frown wanted to know how it worked. He could at least
pretend to feel sorry for me.

“Are you figuring out how to lie
to me, John?”

John straightened, his eyebrows
arching, but Yuri answered for him. “We need to understand your limits so we
can help you use your skill more effectively.”

“Can I turn it off?”

Secretive glances were exchanged
that didn’t include me.

“We don’t know,” Yuri admitted.
“Aside from blocking them physically, can you turn off your eyes? Your ears?”

I swiveled and glared at John.
“You said you could turn your nose off . Why can’t I turn it off?”

Samantha grabbed my shoulder.
“I’m not going to spazz,” I snapped at her. “Let me go.” I tilted myself
forward in the chair to put as much distance between us as I could without
scooting into the floor.

“Protocol,” Samantha said smugly.

I definitely didn’t like her.
Definitely.

“Cleo, there are still things we
don’t understand about suprasenses. They vary for everyone.” Yuri pointed at
his face. “When you see the masks, do they resemble the people beneath them?
Describe my face while I...”

I didn’t want to watch Yuri’s
face. I wanted answers about the real-world implications of my being discovered
by the suprasensor Illuminati. This changed everything for me—everything!—and
they were treating it like a science lesson.

“Enough about me.” They probably
knew it all, anyway. “Tell me about you. What kind of business is YuriCorp?
It’s not like you can advertise yourself in the phone book as mutants for
hire.”

“We’re not mutants,” Samantha
said. “Shelve that attitude if you want to make any friends around here.”

My jury of one cantankerous woman
was still out as to whether or not I wanted friends around here. “Can I call
you freaks?”

“Cleo, I know you’re trying to
get under our skin. It won’t work.” But her grip tightened and I felt a tingle
right before my desire to annoy her subsided.

It felt so peculiar to know I
wanted to provoke her but have no urge to do it. I returned to my original
topic. “You keep insisting you don’t have anything to do with the government
and the X-Files. What
do
you do? How do you get the money to maintain
yourself in such...” I searched for the perfect word. “Luxury?”

Yuri had watched us argue and
finally spoke. “You’re skeptical and apprehensive. This isn’t what you
expected, is it?”

I shook my head. He didn’t need
my precious gift to conclude that.

“What we do is lucrative, but
most of our profits go to other ventures.”

I opened my mouth to ask what
ventures, but Yuri beat me. “Suprasensor monitoring, research and development,
and training.”

“Sounds like spying. Which you
keep saying you don’t do. Everything you’ve been saying is true, or at least
you believe it. Normal people don’t go this long without lying.”

“We practiced,” Yuri admitted. “We
wanted to be able to put you at ease.”

Was it a sad indictment of human
nature that they had to practice being honest? “You probably just practiced how
to lie without me figuring out.”

“We’ve told no outright lies. We
don’t want to trick you. We just want to hire you.”

“But you haven’t told me what
YuriCorp does and what you want me for.” I was beginning to get a bad feeling
about this, even with their sincerity, even with Samantha’s hand on my
shoulder. “Is what you do legal?”

“Of course it’s legal.” Yuri
leaned forward, unblinking and intense. I felt like I was about to be handed
the Big Secret.

“We don’t draw attention to
ourselves, Cleo. It’s the foremost rule for every registered suprasensor, for
every supra-run business. As much as possible, we obey the laws of the
countries we’re in.”