“Never mind,” he said at last. “Just - come up here.”
She turned to her opponent. “Do you know what I did?” she asked him.
He scratched at the back of his head. “Kind of.”
“Kind of won’t save your ass. Go and learn, little one.” She gave his shoulder a slap, and made her way back down the corridor to a door set discreetly into the black padding. She opened it and wound her way upstairs, to where the technicians played.
Stan Wokowski sat in front of a panel of lights and buttons, swinging his head back and forth and pressing buttons. He looked morose.
She stood behind him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey Stan,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“It was better before you got here,” he said.
“If you don’t want me in the training games, tell Alex not to assign me.”
He turned large sad eyes up to her. In general he had the aspect of a basset hound with doleful secrets to keep, but his sorrow always increased when she was on the scene. In spite of that, she appreciated his skill with machinery, and his willingness to explain the details of the technology he worked with. The more she knew about such things, the easier it was to mess with them.
“I tried,” he said. “More than once. He says it’s important for the new people to work with - um - “
“Empaths,” she whispered, behind her hand. “You can say it. There are no children in the room.”
He tugged at his collar. “Did you?” he asked mournfully. “With the laser memory?”
She held up thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart. He raised an eyebrow at her. She opened her fingers wider. “Just that much. Honest Injun. I wanted to see what’d happen next.”
“What happens,” he said, “is that the system backfires. Too much memory, and it can’t digitize it fast enough. So it backs up, and lets off steam at the loose end.”
“Fascinating,” Jaguar said. “I’m glad to know that.”
“Yeah,” he said.
A button on his panel started blinking and he pressed it. A disembodied voice spoke into the room. “Call for Dr. Addams. Supervisor Dzarny wants her in his office. She’s on assignment, as of now.”
“I’m doing training this week,” Jaguar said.
“Not anymore,” the voice replied.
“Okay,” she said, “but Stan will be very disappointed.”
The voice went away, and Jaguar turned back to Stan.
When she saw his face, she chuckled. “Well,” she said. “At least now I know how to make you smile.”
* * * *
Jaguar walked the few blocks between the training center and the Supervisor’s building, enjoying the warm sun on her back and the scent of growth in the air. Springtime on the Planetoid, she thought. Lovely. Perfect.
Although winters were not quite as cold or snowy as on the home planet, and summers weren’t as hot as she liked them, spring was just about perfect. Stan told her once that more moderate weather was inevitable in their kind of system, explaining in great detail how the mass generator created atmosphere in the first place. She listened to some of it, then lost track and amused herself by seeing if she could set off his intercom with a telepathic message.
The Planetoid, constructed from the base of a large asteroid and shuttle-loads of material from the home planet, was enough like earth that the prisoners they brought here could be fooled into thinking they hadn’t left home. Unlike the first bubble dome Planetoid, here there were cities such as the Toronto replica she worked in, eco-sites and the rivers and lakes they’d created in the holes and valleys of this small world. They’d brought thousands of extra tons of dirt from the home planet when they learned this made residents healthier, and less prone to depression. Carefully placed buildings and mountainous structures created the illusion of horizon, and wave shields put the right stars and a moon of the right size in the night sky.
They hadn’t put in the mesa lands that Jaguar loved, but shuttles ran frequently enough for her to get home when her blood and bones cried out for the baking heat and limitless views of New Mexico. And though there was sometimes a sky island sense of boundaries here, she knew she would stay.
She’d been working in the prison system as a Teacher for more than six years, her job to create and run programs that led criminals to face and overcome their deepest fears, going on the post-Killing Times theory that all evil, and therefore all crime, grew from fear. It was work she considered important, and work she happened to be very good at.
She also knew that in spite of suspicions like Stan’s and the Board governors’, it was much easier to live as an empath on the Planetoid than on the home planet. Although attitudes there about psi capacities were shifting, the pace was glacial, and many people still saw empaths as either ludicrous freaks or dangerous lunatics. Only in places like 13 Streams, the New Mexico village where she was born, were the empathic arts seen as normal. In their terms, and in the terms of Jaguar’s Mertec people, the arts were just medicine, used badly or well depending on the skill and integrity of the empath.
She didn’t realize anyone thought differently until she went to live in Manhattan with her grandparents. There, during the Serials, identifying and killing empaths grew to be a popular sport. At least on the Planetoids she wouldn’t be dragged into the bushes and bashed for who she was, no matter how nervous she made them. In fact, some people appreciated her talents.
Alex, for one, who was a highly skilled empath in his own right. He had the arts of the Adept, which allowed him to see through days in ways she couldn’t. Time unfolded for him differently, which might explain his supreme patience, and the way his eyes sometimes shifted focus to see beyond the walls she tried to build against him. Spider Magus, she called him, weaving multilayered webs of finely interconnected lines, then waiting within them to see what would fall his way. In spite of that, she’d come to see him as trustworthy in almost all areas.
Almost all. There were still one or two places where the jury was out.
She didn’t knock on his office door before she entered, and it took him a few minutes to realize someone was in the room with him.
He looked up from his files and saw her standing there, dressed in a black jumpsuit, sleek and shining as the cat whose name she bore. She held her hands palm up toward him.
“What?” she asked.
He gestured at the chair on her side of the desk. She coiled herself into it, leaned back and raised her legs, resting the heels of her boots on the corner of his desk.
He tossed her a file folder. “Your next case. Let me know what you think.”
She opened it and read.
He sat and watched her, swiveling his chair back and forth, taking in the sheen of honey in her walnut hair as it slipped like silk over her shoulders, enjoying the motion of her hand as she curled it behind her ear. Her face remained neutral, even when she lifted it and stared beyond him, considering what she’d just read.
She paid no attention to him when she focused on her work. He could caress her hair, or kiss the back of her neck and she wouldn’t notice. He enjoyed the notion, and turned it this way and that in his mind as he continued to stare.
Recently he’d made it clear that he wanted to share more with her than work and the empathic arts. It was equally clear she wasn’t ready to risk what that would mean. He knew why. She could acquire lovers anywhere, but a trustworthy friend and a supervisor she could actually work with were rare commodities in her world.
He