Mindwalker (14 page)

“Steven!” I cry, alarmed. “Let go!”

“Don't touch
her.
” Steven forces the words through clenched teeth. “Don't ever touch her.”

There's a tinkle of breaking glass. Someone screams. Ian's mouth is open, his face flushed an alarming purplish red. He elbows Steven in the gut, and Steven grunts but doesn't let go. Ian flails until his fingers close around the hilt of a serrated knife on the counter.

I lunge forward, grab his wrist and Steven's hair, and try to pull them apart.

Steven's body jerks. Ian freezes. For an instant, neither one of them moves. Steven's eyes stare glassily into space, then roll back, and his body slumps and crumples to the floor. He lands with a thud, facedown. Ian's knife slips from his fingers and clatters to the tiles.

The music still thumps and grinds in the background, but the crowd has fallen silent. Ian stands, gasping and clutching his throat as his face slowly returns to its usual color. Steven doesn't move.

Ian stares at me, his eyes wide. “What happened to him?”

“The collar.” Bile climbs into my throat. I swallow.

“Is he …”

“He's just unconscious.” I don't want to talk. I can't even look at Ian right now. I'm too confused, too shaken.

Steven stirs, groaning.

“Hey, it's him,” someone whispers.

A low hum of voices sweeps through the room. People inch away from Steven. Then a few start moving toward him. Their expressions darken, turning from fear to contempt. Someone kicks him in the ribs, and he flinches.

“Stop it!” I shout. “All of you, get away from him!”

“What's it to you?” a girl asks.

I glare at her. “He's my friend.”

“Your
friend
?” She says it like it's a foreign concept.

“Yes!” I snap.

Steven tries to stand, stumbles, and falls to his knees. I have to get him out of here. I help him to his feet. He sways on rubbery legs, and I slip an arm around his waist. No one says a word, but I feel their eyes on us as we make our way slowly toward the elevator. People whisper. Girls snuggle against their boyfriends' shoulders, as if for protection.

Steven is still staggering when we make it out of the building, into the cool night air, but at least he can walk now. I help him into the passenger's seat of the car, then slide behind the wheel and slam the door. “Take us home,” I say.

The car pulls out of its space. My phone buzzes. It's a voice mail from Ian. I delete it without listening. Guilt pricks my heart, because I have the feeling Ian's as miserable and confused as I am, but it's just too much to deal with right now. Until tonight, he's never given even the slightest indication that he's attracted to me. I tell myself that one drunken kiss doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Steven leans back in his seat, chest rising and falling with his labored breaths. It seems the drug is still in his system. His eyes are cloudy, his face wet with perspiration. I wonder if it causes him pain as well.

“You didn't have to attack him,” I say quietly. “He wouldn't have hurt me. He was just …” Just what? I don't even know how to finish that sentence.

“You were scared,” Steven murmurs.

I swallow, my throat tight. He's right. I
was
scared, but not for myself. For Ian. I think he might be losing his mind, but
I'm afraid to speak the words aloud, because I feel like if I do, my fear will become reality.

I should report his behavior to IFEN, for his own good. He's in no state to be taking on clients. Yet the idea of going behind his back is repellent to me. If they scan him now, he'll probably come up as a Two or worse, and that will affect his future as a Mindwalker. Still, I can't do nothing. Next time I see him, maybe I'll encourage him to seek therapy.

I close my eyes. “I'm sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” His voice is faint and scratchy. “I'm the one who lost it.” He gives a weak chuckle. “Guess you regret bringing me to that party.”

“No, I don't. But I don't want anything like that to happen again. Will you promise not to attack anyone else, for my sake?”

“Don't know if I can promise that, Doc.”

“Steven, I mean it. I can take care of myself. And I don't want you to hurt anyone or get in trouble.”

There's a long silence.

“Steven?”

“Are you afraid of me now?” he whispers.

“No.”

“It's okay if you are. I wouldn't blame you. I practically strangled him.”

I hesitate. Then, slowly, I reach out and lay a hand over his. “I'm not afraid.”

He looks at me, expression unreadable.

His knuckles are scratched, bleeding. I'm getting blood on my hand, but I don't care. My fingers tighten around his.

The car glides down the road. Advertisements glisten around
us, flowing across the walls of buildings, drifting through the air. A holographic banner for Lucid hovers in the air.

Uncover your mind's potential.

The words float over the image of a smiling woman in a business suit. This part of the city is all shopping districts and expensive apartments. The less glamorous areas—like the treatment facilities and housing projects—are confined to the outskirts.

“Lain?”

“Yes?”

The muscles of his throat work as he swallows. Strands of hair cling to his sweat-damp brow. “Once this is all over, once you erase my memories, I won't remember any of this, will I? I won't remember you.”

I stare out the window, unable to look at his face as I answer, “No. You won't.” That's one of the reasons Mindwalkers aren't supposed to get emotionally attached to their clients. It just causes pain, in the end. “Memories are tied together in clusters. In your mind, I'm linked with your kidnapping. Erasing your pain will also erase me.”

“That's how it is, huh?”

My hand tightens on his. Then I force myself to let go and interlace my fingers in my lap. “That's how it is.”

***

I drop Steven off at his apartment: a huge, featureless gray building on a narrow street lined with other huge, featureless
gray buildings. This district is mostly government housing. Each apartment complex contains hundreds upon hundreds of tiny rooms, stacked on top of each other, for people who can't afford to live anywhere else. This is the sort of place where orphans like Steven usually end up once they turn eighteen.

I wonder where he lived before this. A state home? Or has he spent most of his life in treatment facilities?

The buildings are divided by strips of stubby yellow grass littered with broken glass. In the distance, I hear the wail of a police siren as I walk him to the door. We stand there for a moment, awkward silence hanging over us. “I feel like I should be the one walking you to the front door,” he says.

“I don't mind.” I smile.

The dim moonlight steals the color from his eyes, turning them almost dark. He's looking at me so intently. What does he see? Who am I to Steven? “You look good in green,” he says at last.

My breath catches.

“See you later, Doc.” He presses the pad of his thumb against the biometric scanner. The door clicks open, and he disappears inside.

I linger outside the door for a while longer, looking up at the rows of tiny windows.

That night, I lie awake in bed, staring at the ceiling and remembering the warm pressure of his fingers intertwined with mine. There's a little flutter in my stomach, a stirring of something unfamiliar.

I hug Nutter, curling around him in a fetal position.

Of course I don't want Steven to forget me. I don't want to be left behind. But it's better this way. Better for him.

I drift into the murky waters of half sleep, wander in and out of dreams. Bits of information rise up in my head, like objects floating to the surface of a lake, then disappear.

Steven. Pike. Seven children. One survivor.

A scar, glimpsed through cornsilk hair.

A single photo. A man conjured out of nightmares.

A child's voice calling to me from the shadows of a forest.
Find me.

I'm running through the forest, pushing through wispy gray branches, and I realize they're not branches at all. They're neurons. All around me, spidery gray webs flicker with muted light. I'm plunging deeper, deeper, toward a faint, pulsing gray glow.

As a child, I never wondered what I wanted to do when I grew up. I always knew. Other little girls played school or house with their dolls. I played Mindwalker. I'd set Nutter or Freddy Frog on a stool and have conversations with them about their traumatic pasts, then put a plastic teacup on their heads and pretend it was a Gate. At age ten, I would sit at the dinner table with Father and his friends, my legs not quite long enough to reach the floor, and join in their discussions about neuroscience, sipping grape juice from a wineglass. They'd chuckle as I stumbled over words like
hippocampus
and
amygdala
.

Back then, IFEN hadn't even started to train Mindwalkers, at least not formally. The field of neural modification therapy was still new, still experimental. Experts were batting around the benefits and drawbacks, like cats with a toy. In spite of this, my father was already working with clients, mostly volunteers from treatment facilities. Type Fours. During their visits, he always told me to go to my room, but sometimes I would sneak
partway down the stairs and peek into the living room, watching Father talk to them, these men and women with scars and haunted eyes. He treated them with respect and kindness. Like equals.

I sometimes wonder—if I'd had a different childhood, an ordinary family, would I still have wanted to become a Mindwalker? But that's like asking myself what I'd want if I were a different person altogether. I can't separate my past from myself.

One day at the breakfast table—I was about eleven—Father said to me, “You know, Lainy, you and I are very lucky. We have so much, and it's easy for people like us to take our health and happiness for granted.”

I chewed a spoonful of cereal, looking at him in the sunlight. He was a big man, square-shouldered, with a neatly trimmed brown beard and crinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth. I didn't say anything, just waited, listening intently.

“Others are not so fortunate.” He sipped his coffee, staring off into space. “Years ago, there was … someone I knew. Someone I was very close to.” His voice grew momentarily hoarse. The coffee cup rattled slightly as he set it down. “She was attacked by a group of men who hurt her very badly. A few months later, she took her own life. In the letter she left behind, she told me that dying was the only way she could forget.”

I didn't know what to say. I'd known his early life wasn't easy, but he'd never mentioned anything about this until then. I wanted to hug him, to do
something,
but I knew instinctively that I needed to let him finish.

“It seemed so cruel to me,” he said, “that after enduring
such horror, a person should have to spend the rest of her life carrying the memory around, weighed down by it, reliving the pain over and over again. If only, I thought. If only there was some way to just wipe away that incident, like it never happened. The technology to pinpoint memories in the brain already existed, and researchers were working on a way to translate neural activity into images that could be viewed by other people. I thought that if I could just take that one step further—if I could create a device that would allow someone not only to observe but to actually
change
a memory—I could give people the power to free themselves from past trauma.”

“And you did,” I said, a bit shyly. “Didn't you?”

“Yes. It was … difficult. But with Emmanuel's help, I created the Mindgate. Of course, we're still researching its effects on volunteers. It hasn't been approved for treating the general public. But I'm confident that in time, the treatment will be available to everyone who needs it. People will have the power to liberate themselves from the past. And Mindwalkers will be the ones to give them that power. It's an important role—an exhilarating role—but a perilous one, too … not only because such power is easy to abuse, but because of the toll it takes on its wielder.” He picked up a piece of toast, as if to take a bite, then set it down again. “Do you still want to become a Mindwalker, Lainy?”

I nodded eagerly. “I want to help people. Like you.”

“Even if it's painful?”

The question puzzled me, but I replied immediately. “Yes.”

He took a slow, deep breath and clasped his hands tightly together. The skin around his nails whitened from tension. “There's something I need to show you. Lately, I've been
working with some very troubled patients at a place called Lowen Hills. I think it's time for you to understand the nature and purpose of my work.” A pause. “After this, if you want to change your mind, I'll understand.”