Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (18 page)

"So," the director says to the others, "we make an exception."

Skye's mouth goes dry.

The director turns back to her. "You will work for us for fifteen years, not ten. You will use your talents as we say, seeing what we send you to see. You will send back your thoughts on what you discover. And you will never ever have to harm another human being—monster or not."

Skye thinks for a moment, then understands. "You want me to spy for you."

The director nods. "Precisely."

Skye is trembling. "What's the catch?"

The director smiles. Her smile is cold. "It is simple, really. We offer our assassins our full protection. Legal, mostly. Some, though, those you thought had trained for other jobs, they live different lives. They were trained as assassins, and they can no longer ply their trade. Many of them cannot leave the Guild for threat of reprisal or even death. We keep them here because keeping them here keeps them alive."

Skye's face grows warm as she realizes what the director is saying. "You won't protect me?"

"That is correct," the director says. "We won't even admit you work for us. Ever. If you get in trouble, you are on your own."

Skye bites back her first comment:
It's not fair.
She bites back her second,
You'd send me into trouble with no backup? No safety net?

Instead, she blurts, "Five years."

"What?" the director says.

"If I'm to risk my life for you, if I'm to do something this unprecedented, then I work for five years to repay my debt," Skye says.

The edges of Václav's eyes tilt downward. He's smiling without smiling. He looks down.

"Ten years," the director says.

"Seven and a half," Skye says.

"Ten and full protection," the director says.

"Done," Skye says.

The director tilts her head back and laughs. The laugh is infectious, but no one joins her. They look away as if they do not dare.

Finally, the director catches her breath. "You are the first to change our rules," she says. "How does that feel?"

"I'll let you know," Skye says. "In ten years."

"Fair enough," the director says. "Václav will draw up the agreement with our legal team. The others here will be cited as witnesses, plus we have recorded all of this, in case you worry that we will not keep our end of the bargain."

"I don't worry about you." Skye says.

The director studies her for a long moment. Then nods once. "And I no longer worry about you."

Then she leaves the room. The others follow. The images wink off the wall.

The door remains open.

Skye isn't sure what she's supposed to do.

Then she realizes that none of them know what she's supposed to do either.

This is what freedom feels like.

Like climbing out of a trap into blinding light. The next step is hard to see. But it's there.

She just has to find it.

Eric Del Carlo has been busy since his last appearance in our pages—"Friendlessness" (January, 2012). He's had stories published in
White Cat
and
Shimmer;
an original podcast produced by Earbud Theater; and a novel,
Elyra's Ecstasy,
which he co-wrote with Amber Jayne, was published by Ellora's Cave. Eric's new story about trauma and redemption is dedicated to the memory of his mother, Patricia.

240 pounds, 6'5". Coffee skin turning gray with the circulatory system's sudden halt. He looks like an oak frosted by winter. Four semiprofessional bullet holes in his body. Only one made any difference, but it made all the difference. The bank's surveillance footage shows him mouthing a single name repeatedly as he wades along with his MG4 blazing: "Trixie."

Shooting up hospitals was all the rage that spring, so April on into May I sat in a lot of waiting rooms, breathing the antiseptic air, empathing for amokers. I understood very quickly why somebody would storm in cradling an assault rifle. My sitting ignored for hours and hours in crippling plastic seats called no attention whatsoever; I was just one of dozens, of hundreds. To say nothing of the bureaucratic loop-the-loops people were put through, the casual apathies they encountered, the daily catastrophic screw-ups. That's why hospitals drew amokers. But I don't deal with why. I handle the thing itself, when the pot boils over, when the vision goes red and pulsing.

When it is too late for any long-term preventative measure, I am there, simply, to prevent

It wasn't difficult to look miserable, and appearing miserable made me invisible in the long rectangle of the waiting area, thin navy carpeting underfoot, anemic blue walls closing us all in. There was more fear than pain, a lot more, and the comforts were sparse. Everybody felt like, and was treated as, a supplicant.

A headache buzzed in my skull, and I'd made the mistake—the same one I made every time—of drinking the cafeteria's coffee. I could have sat all these hours on a park bench or gazing at an incoming tide and been content. It wasn't the time that was aggravating. The Agency paid me for my time.

But there was more than fear and pain and shame in this room, and it kept tweaking the hypersensitive receptors in my brain so that my muscles would jump, and my system would twang as if to molecular stimuli.

These were just momentary flashes of frustration and anger. Specific, not omnidirectional. Very acute but not the sustained fury I was watching for.

The automatic doors opened, that same monotonous cycling sound I'd been listening to all morning, and someone came in out of the springtime winds.

Synapses lit. I felt the warm terrible injection of adrenaline. Anyone who doesn't 'path—and
that's most everybody in the Agency—doesn't understand what it is like. Not in any meaningful way.

I was sitting where I could watch the length of the room. I hadn't just planted myself facing the doors. Not a good idea to be the first thing they see when they walk in.

Lifting my chin and turning my head, as on a sore neck, I saw who had entered. My heart thudded in my chest, and sweat oiled my palms. But I still appeared as a man suffering an agonizing wait to see a medical technician. Sometimes hospital amokers go after staff exclusively. Sometimes it's whoever is on the premises, including bed-ridden patients. I understood why the Agency had me here. I had looked at the files of previous hospital incidents. I habitually read aftermath reports. It's not morbidity on my part. Not even curiosity. It's something almost but not quite... maudlin.

Maybe it is nearer the instinct that causes you to say sentimental words over your vanquished mortal enemy.

She was short-haired, dark-haired, face narrow but not pinched. Her bared shoulders appeared strong and tensed. She wore sunglasses, big hoopy things, tinted not opaque. She carried a handbag, and she walked with a purpose.

Fury,
my receptors told me.
Fury, fury, fury.
But—

But...

Something didn't quite jibe. It was nothing I could put into a report. I could—maybe—sit with another 'path and parse out my responses in that first moment of contact. Perhaps, over several Scotches, I might explain to that peer why I rose and crossed smoothly toward her.

I had the power of priority contact with the on-site security staff as well as the precinct police. I send up a signal; they come. They deal with the crisis, having gotten a substantial jump on the potentially explosive situation. A not insignificant number of lives can be saved that way.

But I didn't make the contact. Instead, I strode up to the woman, putting myself in her path.

She stopped with a jerk. I had come in from nowhere.

I leaned in, the inches intimate between my lips and her ear, and I said softly, "You have a gun in your purse."

Stepping back, watching, I still felt the pump of adrenaline. But there was no heat in my body now. The moment had cooled and crystallized. I was outside myself. This, then, was maybe what it felt like to be the victim, in those final seconds.

Somehow he is in the fountain. It's right out of old Hollywood, deserving of a crane shot that spirals away from the downed killer steeped in the bloodied jet-circulated water. The view widens, and his victims appear around the shopping mall's central fountain, laid out in a pattern that is surely random but which looks to have some algorithmic basis.

We walked outside, and it was already unclear to me if she was leading me or I was escorting her. I didn't touch her.

The wind was strong but not cold. Her short hair was undisturbed; mine blew across my eyes. Litter tumbled up the street.

At the curb she was the first to stop, which made me think I was indeed following.

She turned.

"You're a 'path."

"I am a Vigil."

Her eyes were wide behind her sunglasses' big lenses. "Why are you accosting me?"

I repeated what I'd said a moment ago: "You have a gun in your purse." The bag had no strap. She carried it like a football.

"I've got a permit for it."

It surprised a laugh out of me; it sounded like a hiccup. I added, feeling the need to explain myself, "A gun is still a gun."

"You're a 'path." Now she was the one repeating herself.

"I am a Vigil." That is a stock response. The Agency discourages the term
empath.
It leads the public to think of us as mind readers, and that doesn't help anybody.

"Vigil. Very well. Why are you accosting me?" It felt like our little exchange had already lapped itself. Before I could try to contribute something new, she said, "If you're concerned about my legal firearm, where are the authorities? Why haven't you called the police?"

"I..."

She pressed. "What do you sense from me, Vigil? Huh? What's troubling you so badly?"

I didn't like that she knew so much about our procedures. Even after a decade of being in the field, most people think Vigils intervene directly in amoker incidents, like we're superheroes—or even just heroes. I have never qualified for weapons use. And I don't want to.

This woman was pissing me off. I wasn't handling her correctly. Then again, I had no method. I didn't deal with people this way.

I glared at her. And opened my receptors, consciously. And—

The fury was gone. Nothing. No trace. There
should
have been a trace, a suggestion, especially after such volatility.

I was dismayed; and it showed.

"Well?" she sneered.

I had nothing. Except a legal authority, which I now wielded clumsily. "What's your business here at this hospital?" I asked stiffly.

She hooked a finger over the sunglasses and tugged them off. Her eyes had lovely depths of amber and bronze. "I'm visiting a patient. José Carubba, room 602. He's recovering from laparoscopic kidney surgery."

Having gone this far, I of course had to check it out, feeling foolish, knowing there would be a José Carubba in 602. There was. I had a look at her carry permit too. Her name was Daphne Verges.

"My name is Bob Galley, and I'm sorry to have troubled you."

I expected something snide from her. She had the right. I wasn't even sure why I'd offered my name. We were standing by the elevators.

Daphne thumbed the button. Her sunglasses still poked out of the pocket of her bare-shoulder top, so I had a last chance to look into those eyes.

"You should ask me out for a drink, Bob," she said.

"Would you like to go out and get a drink, Daphne?"

The elevator doors opened with a chime. "Yes," she said, stepping aboard.

She must have been heading for the altar but got distracted on the way. She's the only one sitting up in the pew, amid Sunday-best bodies. The right third of her jaw and most of the exposed cheekbone are only bony thistles. Her blond hair is scorched and caked with red darkness. Both eyes are open. She appears bored, attentive, a habitual churchgoer who already knows where the sermon is going.

You don't ask about a handgun permit on a first date. I sat with Daphne Verges at a high, round, onyx-bright table and wondered—without panic—what the hell we were doing.

She wanted to talk about school. It was just a conversational feint. I let her get on with it.

"I didn't go to college," I said, when she had finished a lengthy account of her school days.

She blinked extravagantly. Then immediately apologized. I thought that was nice of her. "I don't want to come off as an Ivy League snob."

"You're not," I said, not needing to put any excess reassurance into my tone. I had already found it was easy to speak truthfully to her. That doesn't happen often.

She looked around the club. It was tastefully peopled and decorated. "You bring a lot of women here?" she asked.

"What's 'a lot'?"

"You know I don't go in for jealousy." She lifted her drink to unsuccessfully hide a smile behind it. It was a pleasant bit of flirtatious business.

I let her see my smile. "Well, I don't
know
that... exactly."

"But you sense it." She looked at me directly across the table, with a certain soberness. She was letting me know she hadn't forgotten what I was.

"I do," I said. Again, truth. It was refreshing. And peculiar: earlier today I had been convinced this woman was an amoker. There was nothing of that fury in her now. Not a trace. It disturbed me that I had detected it at all.

After that we filled up some time with a few other feints. Neither of us seemed to have any deal-breaking intellectual blind spots or extreme opinions. She had dressed for our date, and so had I; and now I believed it
was
a date.

"You must have been just a boy during the NCW," she said, filling in a comfortable pause.

It wasn't a filler kind of question, though. "Yes." I took a swallow from my drink and set the glass down very precisely. "I must have been."

Her amber and bronze eyes flicked away. "Oh, that was silly, Daphne. Real silly."

"There's something endearing about a woman addressing herself in the second person," I said, and meant it and made sure I sounded like I meant it.

She sniffed a laugh. "That's nice of you."

"You've been nice too." I leaned across the table a bit. "Yes, I was eight years old for the NCW."

"I was six."

"It was probably a different experience for you."

"Well, yes, Bob. It was. I'm sure."

I felt the tension. This was, I thought, maybe the make or break moment of the evening. We had stumbled into a sensitive subject. I was a Vigil. Vigils were peculiar byproducts of the NCW, the Neuro-Chemical War, a two-month period of rampant bioterrorism that transformed this nation forever. That's the party line, of course.
The NCW changed everything.
It just happens to be true.

"Why don't you tell me what it was like for you?" I suggested.

Daphne looked startled. I smiled, to let her know it was okay to talk about it, to tell this woman that I didn't
own
the NCW just because it had made me into an empath and a Vigil.

We got fresh drinks, and she wove me her tale. It was typical of a child's viewpoint—full of fear, confusion, small telling details lost on a six-year-old that later took on vast poignancy. I listened. I was glad to listen. Each mundane turn of her story distanced me further from my own history. It had indeed been a different experience for me. It was different for every prepubescent human being exposed to the terrorists' neurotoxin during those two months.

"Sometimes I can't believe it was twenty-five years ago," was how she finished.

I recognized the moment as another crux. Make or break. Do or... well, not die. But I felt no burning need to spend the night alone.

Lifting my glass, I said, "To be alive is to celebrate."

Daphne laughed at the cornpone sentiment. Just like I knew—or sensed, anyway—she would.

Only the stadium security stamp on the back of his bloodied hand lends the scene any irony. He concealed his weapon in lined pouches distributed over his person and assembled the deadly instrument in a restroom during the second quarter. This is a johnny-come-lately. The term "amoker" had already entered the vernacular. Despite this security misstep, defensive measures were tightening everywhere. There were amokers now but not yet Vigils. We were still being discovered and studied; training and implementation were years off yet. This amoker had forty-three seconds of unbridled mayhem, then the crowd took him down and tore him apart like a pack of rabid hyenas.

The afterglow was rosy. Degrees more than rosy, in fact. I held her against me, and it seemed that something that had been in motion a long, wearying time started to slow. We murmured friendly inconsequentialities to each other.

Then she began to ask me questions.

I parried. I evaded. I waited until she drifted asleep, then eased our cooling bodies apart and slipped out of bed.

I peeled an orange in my chromy kitchen and ate the segments one by one while I checked my secured link. There is a lot of Agency cloak and dagger rigmarole that I don't care about. But I'm very conscientious about my particular work, and always stay apprised of my assignments.