Threadbare Read online

  The crowd of travelers thinned the farther into the structure we went. The few people in this area all wore the Fighting Storm uniforms and moved with purpose, though some pairs laughed and exchanged conversation as they walked.

  Perimeter hallways displayed holos of recruitment posters—smiling uniformed men and women beckoning the eager and naive youth to join up, see the universe, have adventures beyond their imaginations.

  With my empathic sense, I touched a few of the soldiers we passed, picking up boredom, along with high levels of barely restrained aggression. There was guilt too, and stress, and a smattering of depression, and I wondered what battles these soldiers had fought, won, and lost.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.

  Sooner or later, they’ll have to shut the project down.

  Something about that statement and the way in which Walters delivered it sent chills crawling up my spine. If the Fighting Storm shut down the project, what happened to the patient? If the patient was the project, what did shutting it down mean, exactly?

  More hallways and we arrived at a door where a grim-faced woman in the same brown uniform as all the other members of the Storm I’d seen checked my identification. She scanned my fingerprints and retinas and presumably compared them to the ones on file at the Academy. The woman meant business, a holstered pistol visible at her side. She carried the first weapon I’d seen on any of the Fighting Storm’s personnel, and I assumed I was about to enter a secure area. When she waved us along, I let out a breath.

  We took an elevator to another floor, where wall and furnishing colors changed from utilitarian gray to medical white, and I began to associate paint choices with departments: gray for public areas, visitor spaces, white for medical, and I assumed other colors for other services. We stepped off the lift, and we were halfway to a curved desk and a white-coated receptionist when the pain wave hit.

  It doubled me over, drilling like a laser through my brain, tightening all the muscles in my body, then turning them to jelly under the onslaught. My knees hit the floor. My vision went red.

  Shouting came from all around me, but it rose and fell in my ears, the blood pounding too hard for clear hearing. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t take in enough air, and all I managed was a wheezing gasp and a groan.

  I felt Walters’s hand on my shoulder and jerked away from the contact, unable to take increased emotional input from him along with the pain I suffered. I squeezed my eyes shut, but tears leaked from beneath the lids. A door hissed open, and for an instant the agony swelled to even greater heights. Flashes went off behind my eyelids, and I feared I might pass out. The door closed, providing a slight buffer.

  Empathic pain. Red vision. Red meant pain. It was how my empathic sense translated emotions and feelings into something I could understand—through colors. My Academy instructors called it synesthetic perception. For a moment, the red blinded me.

  I’d spent years building and strengthening my mental walls against the emotions and feelings of others until my instructors compared my protective capabilities to three-foot-thick slabs of metal—the strongest they’d seen in nine years of graduating students.

  This pierced them as if they were tissue paper.

  Heavy footsteps rapidly approached, and something thin and sharp jabbed my neck. A few torturous moments later, a heavy fog descended, enveloping my brain, and the pain receded to a manageable level.

  They knew. They knew to expect my collapse. They were ready for it. What the hell?

  I straightened on my knees, blinking my teary vision at the gray-haired man in a lab coat crouched in front of me, the receptionist to my right, and Walters on my left. Glow panels overhead reflected off the white tile floor, too bright. Walters shook his head. The woman’s lips were tight and her eyes wide. The doctor—Dr. Whitehouse by the name badge clipped to his front pocket—smiled?

  “Congratulations,” he said. “That’s the strongest reaction we’ve seen so far. We didn’t want to compromise the test by warning you.”

  Not an apology and definitely not good enough. I was still incapable of speech, so I glared instead. It didn’t faze him.

  Okay, I wasn’t much of a glarer.

  With the torture dimmed, I could analyze the source, and I realized it wasn’t just pain but a combination of various emotions so powerful that they manifested themselves as one tremendous ongoing agony. Pain, yes, but also fear, confusion, depression, anger, and overwhelming frustration. Red, purple, gray, so many colors they melded to black and I couldn’t separate them. Someone suffered horribly, and with a sinking feeling in my stomach, I had a pretty good idea who.

  I struggled to my feet, using Walters’s shoulder for support. My limbs trembled with the effort, but I started walking, pushing past the doctor, who was a little slower to rise. I reached the door behind the desk, and no one stopped me. It slid aside with a soft hiss at my approach, and I stood in a corridor.

  The smell hit me first. Everywhere inside the base, the recycled air had a slightly stale scent. One could only do so much with arboretums and scrubbers. But here…. Here the air carried overtones of fear, sweat, and death.

  A long window taking up most of the right-hand wall, probably one-way glass, looked in on a patient room. The rolling tray table and nightstand had been demolished, the bed, metal and heavy, overturned on its side, and the remains of a lamp shattered across the tile floor. Thick wrist and ankle restraint straps dangled from the bed frame, ragged and useless.

  The sole occupant lay on the floor in the farthest corner. I wasn’t surprised to find a woman. Her emotions, violent or not, felt feminine in nature. She faced away from the observation window and door, so I couldn’t see her face, but long black hair hung down her back, in stark contrast to her torn white pajamas. The doctors had shaved one patch on her head, showing red, angry scars on the scalp. The rest of the hair twisted into a matted mess, the rips in the pajama fabric exposing wide swaths of skin covered in scratches and shallow cuts. From fingernails. I guessed her own.

  The doctor arrived beside me, but I couldn’t tear my gaze from the woman in the corner. She slept, her back rising and falling in slow, even motions, though every few seconds she jerked violently. Even in sleep, her emotions roared, blocking out everything else, including the man on my left. I’d have given anything to be fully telepathic right then, to have been able to reach and comfort her. But no true telepaths existed, at least none we’d discovered yet.

  Right there, right then, there was only me.

  “What’s her name?” I whispered.

  “VC1.”

  I looked at him. “What’s. Her. Name?” It came out as a growl, and he took a step back.

  He studied me for a moment and nodded once like he’d come to some decision. Then he stared through the window, focusing on the patient as if seeing her for the first time. “Victoria Corren,” he said, his mouth twisting downward as if he’d tasted a sour fruit. “She preferred ‘Vick.’”

  Preferred. Not prefers. Like postsurgery she’d become a nonperson to them.

  Dr. Whitehouse hated his patient. Or she disgusted him. Or something. I couldn’t filter his emotions over the screaming of Vick’s, but I didn’t need empathic skills to read his expression. “What happened to her?”

  “That’s classified.” At my huff of impatience he added, “Unless we decide to give you the job.”

  Oh, they’d offer me the position if Whitehouse had anything to say about it. He may not have liked me, but he was too excited about my reaction in the outer room.

  “Why me?”

  He nodded. Now I asked the right question. “You’re a 91 percent empathic brainwave match, the closest we’ve found, and the most likely candidate to reach her.”

  That explained a lot. In my studies and internships at hospitals, my mentors exposed me to plenty of suffering people. Nothing hit me the way she did. Granted, she suffered more than most, but a brainwave match-up like that would have provided a direct link be
tween her emotions and my senses and doubled or tripled the effect. And if there were physical contact….

  I shuddered. Even without much for comparison, working with Vick Corren would undoubtedly present the challenge of a lifetime.

  Raising my hand, I brushed my fingertips across the observation window, darkening the glass to opaque, blocking her from my view.

  Whitehouse took a breath. “The Fighting Storm needs her.” A grudging admission. “She was the best damn soldier we’d ever trained, and the organization’s spent a lot of money to test this experimental equipment to repair the damage, but it’s not enough. We need her. We need the technology to work. And she needs you.”

  I USED a stylus to sign a trial contract with the Fighting Storm and passed that datapad back to Dr. Whitehouse. He exchanged it for a second one displaying Vick’s file. We sat across from each other at a square table in his spacious office, coffee in the warmer on a nearby counter, personnel schedules scrolling on a wall monitor, fake potted plants for ambiance.

  More color coding. Beige walls for office spaces. Code for “lack of imagination.”

  For the next month, the doctors and trainers would test and evaluate me, see how I worked with my patient, see what progress she made, and take it from there.

  I pored over the file, noting the rows of Xs where information had been deleted—the “classified” parts, Whitehouse informed me. I pieced together the gist of her horror story.

  Enlistment at eighteen. Superior rankings in martial arts, expert marksman, highly intelligent, remarkably stable psychological profile, fast-tracked for team leadership positions, 94 percent mission success rate.

  It was easy to see why the Storm wanted to keep her.

  Then the accident—mechanical failure combined with careless error. I read the words on the screen, the only sounds the bubbling of the coffee and the ever-present hum of the gravity generators. They wrote it in clinical language, but I was the creative sort, and my imagination filled in the gruesome details. During a timed training exercise, an airlock refused to release. Three soldiers inside, one of them Vick. They didn’t give the others’ names, likely to preserve their privacy. Air depleted. One soldier panicked and opened fire on the mechanism. Ricocheting bullets ripped Vick’s skull apart and killed the other two instantly. I closed my eyes and breathed, trying to clear the image from my mind.

  “If he’d waited patiently for help, they all would have lost consciousness, but they wouldn’t have died,” Whitehouse said. “And there were other mistakes made.” I picked up his bitterness, more than the accident explained. A tinge of deep orange registered when I read him. I chalked it up to his profession and his failure to save them all, even if trying would have been futile.

  “Vick didn’t panic.” With her background, it was an easy assumption to make.

  “No,” Whitehouse said, confirming it.

  Impressive.

  She was brain-dead when they retrieved her body from the airlock, but the medical staff felt they had enough tissue left to work with using implant technology developed by the research department. Vick had one highly experimental chance of survival, the equipment barely past the initial testing stages. No family on record meant no one to ask for permission.

  I paused. “Who signed off on the experimentation?” Whom should I be blaming for Vick’s torment?

  “The Great and Powerful Oz.”

  “Pardon?”

  “We’re a Wizard of Oz operation. You know, ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ and all that. Nobody knows who Oz is. There are dozens of front men and mouthpieces between us and him. For security reasons.”

  Made sense. I hadn’t read Wizard of Oz since I was eight, but I got it, and I could see where the owner of a mercenary organization would have lots of enemies.

  “I sit on the board that makes most of the day-to-day decisions, but we didn’t make that one.”

  Dr. Whitehouse, professional buck passer.

  I dug for the feelings beneath his response. If it had been up to him, I don’t think he would have saved her at all. I got animosity, not mercy or pity, not concern or nervousness about using potentially unsafe technology. Part of him wanted to let Vick die, but Oz overruled him.

  Oz signed off.

  And Vick Corren became VC1.

  I returned to her file. She’d lost most of twenty-five years of memory (God, she’s only three years older than me) and all ability to express her emotions like a “normal” human being. The technology was supposed to make her into some sort of super soldier. Among other enhancements, it suppressed her feelings so all focus went toward her job. Except it didn’t work quite the way the researchers planned. Feelings built and built within her until she lashed out at anyone and anything within range. By the time they figured out the cause, they’d driven her half mad. Drugs failed. They slowed her down, made her unusable in the field. The implants could dampen her emotions temporarily, but they couldn’t permanently erase them. Sooner or later, she needed an outlet.

  In the last couple of weeks, they’d taken to keeping her constantly sedated. My hands clenched on the datapad.

  No one here knew exactly what Vick felt. They hadn’t had the services of a reliable empath. Even among the talented, empathic skills were rare. And they didn’t have time to get much from the few other applicants before they washed out.

  But I knew. I knew how much she hurt. The drugs Whitehouse gave me were wearing off, and her pain bled through my shields, manifesting in a massive migraine.

  The last section of her file showed my brainwave patterns obtained from Academy records, and Vick’s, superimposed on top of each other. Whitehouse was right. They matched almost perfectly. A one in a million shot. We didn’t think the same thoughts, but we thought in the same way. Truly amazing, considering our different occupations. I rubbed my temples and pushed the datapad away.

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “She doesn’t talk.”

  “She can’t?” That would make my job a lot harder.

  “The implant technicians assure me she can. But she doesn’t.”

  Given how they treated her, I didn’t blame her one bit. “Let me try.”

  He reached for a call button embedded in the table’s surface. “I’ll arrange to reduce the sedative gas.”

  I covered his hand with my own, ignoring the upward surge of his emotional input at the contact. “Turn it all the way off.”

  Whitehouse shot me a look like I’d lost my mind. “She’ll tear you to pieces. We have to feed her through a slot.” He leaned forward, eyes cold and hard. “She’s trained to kill in a hundred different ways. We’re not sure which skills she’s retained and which she’s forgotten. We won’t know until we can communicate with her. But she clearly possesses some of them.”

  I remembered her demolished room and furnishings and swallowed hard.

  My chair squeaked when I shoved it back and stood. “She needs to express her emotions in a healthy way. Her brain has forgotten how. At a guess I’d say she’s using your implant technology to avoid feeling anything, but a person can’t bury emotions forever. They’re coming out, and not the way you want them to. Dulling her brain makes things worse and will impede my efforts to reach her.” I paused at his expression. “You’ve been sedating her a lot, haven’t you? And I don’t just mean mildly.”

  “VC1—”

  “Vick.”

  “Excuse me?” He wasn’t used to being interrupted. Irritation boiled beneath his calm exterior.

  “Vick,” I said, softening my tone. “It’s her name. A human one. Surely she has a right to the use of her own name. If you want her to act human, you’ll need to treat her humanely.”

  Immediate resistance. I doubted he’d ever think of Vick as more than a test subject, a project.

  “That’s what the Storm wants, right?” I asked, trying a different approach.

  Reluctant capitulation. Okay. Pleasing the organization was important to him. To do that
he needed me. And Vick. At least I knew which angle to play there.

  “Very well, Vick, then.” He spit the name like venom.

  Working with this man was not going to be easy.

  Whitehouse fetched a mug from a cabinet and filled it from the coffee dispenser. The aroma called to me, but I didn’t want any distractions right then. “Yes, we’ve routinely sedated the sub—patient,” he said, returning to my original question, “in order to perform tests without risk of injury to her or ourselves.”

  “Idiots.” I couldn’t help it. It just slipped out. My stomach muscles clenched while his anger seethed. He went completely rigid as his practiced professional gaze settled on me.

  Oh, they must really have needed me. Otherwise I’d have been fired by then. “Have you ever had a nightmare, a really really bad one?”

  The doctor hmmphed. “Of course. Who hasn’t?”

  I paced the length of the office. Expensive wood desk, comfortable leather chair. “Have you ever had one you had to fight to wake up from?”

  He had. I knew he had, and they’d traumatized him. His emotional response was painful and… personal. Much more powerful than I expected. I could only guess about treating a team of mercenaries. He worked to save soldiers. Soldiers died. A lot.

  “Make your point.”

  I traced my fingers along his very clean desktop, then crossed to the opposite wall to admire a framed Earth holo. Mountains and a river, the water flowing incessantly. It was very soothing. I fought down a twinge of homesickness and focused. “Sedating someone like Vick is like trapping her in the worst nightmare you can imagine. Only she can’t wake herself up, no matter how hard she tries. No matter how much she knows it’s just a dream.” I drew on Academy lectures and an internship I completed with their affiliated hospital. Nonempathic physicians rarely possessed the experience to know how to handle that sort of impairment, so they needed a specialist like me. “The drugs hold her under. Multiply your darkest nightmare times a hundred. That’s what sedation is for her.”

  I saw his realization like rays of light in a dark room, and yet the mixed emotional response surprised me. He was chagrined, but I sensed pleasure. Pleasure at her suffering. And he hated himself for that.