Crystal Choice: The Second Novel in the Projector War Saga Read online

  “I only recently found Robbins’s tampering, sir. Now I have questions.”

  Medina arched an eyebrow. “Completely understandable, except for one piece. How could you tell it was Robbins?”

  “My lines tried to warn me right after he messed with my thoughts. He wiped that from my awareness at the time, then buried the memory. Once I started looking, I found the alert.”

  Medina grinned. “That’s a useful trick. I’ll let him know. He’s usually good about that sort of thing, but we haven’t run into very many Visuals like you. Actually, I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone like you, Miss Farina.”

  I blinked. “You knew Robbins was going to mess with my memory?”

  “We don’t know very much about the Superiors. In fact, we know far less than we should, given the circumstances. The fewer people who know about them, the better control we have over when that information becomes Agency-wide, and the fewer people are prematurely assassinated. Trust me, we did you a favor.”

  Assassinated? I couldn’t tell if it was a threat or not, given the matter-of-fact expression on his face.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “What do you want to have happen?”

  I bit my lip. Medina kept turning this back on me, like I could answer his questions—like he was being reasonable. This was just a way for him to give me enough rope to hang myself with. I closed my mouth and leaned back in the chair. I’d already charged in without thinking once. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

  Medina sighed. “Agent 32, that wasn’t a rhetorical question. Do you want to keep digging into the Institute? Do you want out of the Agency? Do you want to go back to being a regular tactical agent? Your options are open. I just want to know where you want to go from here.”

  I stayed silent—though I did trigger the WATCH module. It sent my lines into an analysis frenzy so I could see the slightest twitch of a muscle and, now, the merest hint of an unguarded thought. The downside was that I couldn’t keep it up for long without tiring myself out.

  His eyelids twitched as he watched me sit there motionless, then his eye flicked down to the left corner of his vision, and he frowned. That move was deliberate—and practiced. His muscles moved in perfect synch, and then stayed where he told them to go. Medina must be a fantastic poker player.

  “Look, Farina, I’m trying to help you here. I can’t do that if you refuse to work with me. Now, Robbins is outside. If you want to play this way then fine. I’ll call him in, and we can get this over with.”

  “You can’t wipe my memories,” I said. I tried to keep the sounds even like I was practicing in Ms. King’s class but I couldn’t tell whether or not I was successful.

  Medina inclined his head. “Can or can’t isn’t the question here. I don’t bluff. That doesn’t mean I want to wipe your memories and expel you from the Agency. I have a feeling that would get very messy for everyone by the time we were through. Instead, why don’t you tell me why you wanted to talk with the Superior?”

  This wasn’t any less dangerous territory but, if what Medina said was true, I didn’t have much of a choice.

  “A friend of mine has gone missing, and I think the Institute is involved. The Superior talked to me last time, so I figured that asking her wouldn’t be any worse than asking the Agency—who is apparently under the impression that Briggs is on a military training mission.”

  “I see you’ve been talking with Hunt, then. Good. I don’t have a problem with you interviewing the prisoner so long as you show me the memory through my interface device and promise not to talk about her existence to anyone. That includes Agents Smith and Hunt. Understand that even the strike team that brought her in has had their memories altered. Very few people know of her existence, and even fewer remember that they know.”

  I couldn’t decide whether to be pleased that Medina had given in so easily, or worried about what he was going to do after I reported my conversation to him. The man was a complete enigma. Still, his terms made sense, and at least it would put me on that list of people who knew about the Superior.

  I stood. “Thank you, sir.”

  He followed suit and extended a hand, which I took. “Do think about what you want to do in the future, Agent. There isn’t a department in the Agency that wouldn’t snap you up in a heartbeat—and mine is no exception.”

  “I will.” I turned to leave.

  “Oh, Agent Farina?”

  I looked at him back over my shoulder so I could watch his lips as he spoke.

  “I will expect to see you here immediately after your interview with the prisoner. Be prompt.”

  I nodded and hurried away.

  The tac agent from before led me to the Superior’s room, and let me inside. Then he locked the door after me. I barely noticed the lock turn, though. All my attention was on the woman sitting in the chair. Her eyes were closed, back ramrod straight, with hands cuffed to the table.

  “You’ve changed,” she said with her eyes still closed.

  I pulled a chair from the corner of the room and sat across the table from the Superior. “Yes, you could say that.” After all, quite a bit had happened since the last time we’d met. Now I knew who and what I was. I wasn’t scared of my own shadow anymore.

  “You are not easy to find,” she said.

  I cocked my head. “Yeah?”

  Her face twisted into a slight smile, eyes still closed. “You left no name for me to call you by.”

  “Neither did you.”

  She was faintly amused. “They just call me Defect. I’m the only one with Instructor genes that isn’t Psionic. I prefer just D.”

  “I’m Crystal Farina, Agent 32.”

  Her eyes snapped open. “I guess that was unpreventable. I warned you about merely going along with the Agency’s machine.” She shook her head. “They read your mind, I suppose. Pity. They surely know where I am by now.”

  “They?”

  “The Institute. I told you before. I am a failed experiment—too smart by half to be a Zeta-Superior, and without the mental abilities of an Instructor. My walls make me hard to control, and now, by coming to you, I’ve completely broken my training. Oh yes, they will kill me the moment the Instructor they’ve sent to be your watchdog finally gets up the courage to unsheathe her claws.”

  “Claws?” I looked at her hands, but they looked perfectly normal. The Superiors in D.C. had two inches of white bone where their nails should have been.

  D bared her teeth. A moment later, razor sharp claws were jutting from her fingertips. “A natural weapon. They are long enough to kill, hard to detect, and quick to deploy. What other natural weapon would the Institute give their Superiors?”

  I swallowed. “They’re trying to create super soldiers? Why?”

  She looked at me through slit eyes. “You’re the perfect little neurodivergent, figure it out. And while you’re at it, why don’t you figure out why I’m talking to you instead of your Intelligence Director?”

  “You want me because I’m new.”

  She grinned, showing a mouth full of teeth that could cut through bone. “And because you’re independent enough to do what needs to be done. The Institute has been steering the Agency to places it could be useful but out of the way for years. Sometimes through donors. Other times, though more direct means.”

  My blue lines spat out the logical conclusion to her explanation. “You think the Agency has someone from the Institute inside it, guiding what we do.”

  “Yes. That person has been looking for me since I got here, but she has been blocked by your little friend. As soon as she gets clearance from the Institute, he won’t be a problem anymore, and I’ll be an example.” Fear; icy and cold flashed through her consciousness in spite of the nonchalance in her surface thoughts. The disparity between the layers of her mind was impressive. She had more control
over her thoughts than anyone I’d ever seen. What had driven her to develop that control?

  I brushed that question away. It wasn’t the most important thing right now. “You must have things you want to accomplish? If the Institute was not coming for you, what would you do?”

  That brought her to laugh—but it was a twisted humor that stemmed from painful memories deep in her mind. “I want the Institute to burn, and then I want to leap into the flames and dance on the charcoaled corpses of the scientists who created me.”

  I flinched away from the savage joy that slashed across the layers of her consciousness as fire lit in her eyes. I definitely did not want to continue down that road. I changed the subject again. “You still haven’t answered my question about why the Institute is creating super soldiers.”

  “No, I suppose I haven’t. I didn’t think it would be hard to guess, though. They’re taking Turnips and turning them into Zeta-Superiors capable of kidnapping fully trained neurodivergents to experiment on. When their process of creating Alpha-Superiors—fully Psionic war machines like the Instructors, but without the gene pool problem—is complete, they will be able to evolve the rest of humanity so that they, also, are Superior.”

  Evolve the rest of humanity? “They want to change us? Why?”

  She gave a derisive snort. “They throw around words like ‘curing cancer’ and ‘ending death’, but they really just want a population they can control. Toppling regimes is difficult, but promising everlasting life with powers most Turnips only dream of makes it that much simpler. They argue that this is merely an extension of what nature is already doing. You neurodivergents came about naturally, after all. They are merely speeding up the process. That’s one of the reasons they needed an individual to penetrate your organization. The fact that she’s in a perfect position to make me an example to any Superior who dares disobey them is only a perk.”

  “And who is this Instructor you think has infiltrated the Agency?”

  She shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Agent. She is in the perfect position to deceive any new additions to the Agency. Even if you did believe me, you wouldn’t be able to defeat her. She’s a PS8, and an E100,000. That means she can lift over half a ton with her mind alone—understand? You would have to go after her by yourself. In short, you would never survive.”

  I clenched my jaw. D wasn’t wrong. I had never heard of a Psionic with so much raw power at her disposal. Still, I’d come here to try and find Briggs, and whoever this Instructor was, she would know where he was. I had to try. “Who is she?”

  D closed her eyes. “You would call her Ms. King.”

  “What?” I stood, and the chair behind me fell over. “You have to be mistaken. I’ve been watching her, and she couldn’t possibly be—”

  I snapped my mouth shut as the blue lines flashed for attention. I let them take me back through my memory and watch every time Ms. King stared out at me with that predatory look in her eyes. Mr. West had warned me that someone in the Agency wasn’t who they claimed. Now, who was the person he’d had the most contact with? Who was in the best position to figure out that he knew, then manipulate Houston into eliminating him? Who had shifted my mission during the fundraiser when it looked like I was going to discover the man with the badly tied bowtie was a Zeta-Superior?

  Ms. King was there for all of it, posing as the one person I could trust to guide me through my transition to the Agency. Well, at least I knew how she’d controlled the Superiors that had tried to attack me a few weeks ago. She was an Instructor, and that was her job: to instruct the dumb little super soldiers her makers had created to do their bidding. She was a general in the Institute’s army, and they’d been using her to keep the Agency off their tail.

  Taking her down would be just as impossible as D feared. I wouldn’t just be fighting Ms. King. I would be going against the entire Agency.

  That brought another question. What in the world was I going to tell Medina?

  “You see it, then.”

  I nodded as the Tac guy from the front opened the door. “Are you alright?” he asked. “The sensors picked up an impact.”

  That would be the chair. “I’m fine. Tell Medina I’ll be out shortly. I have his answers.”

  I looked back at the Superior sitting there with a battleground instead of a mind. She was telling the truth, and it was her last hope. I could see the fate that waited for her through the fractures of her mind as she tried to keep it together. They would breed her for her genes, and then take her apart piece by piece.

  I shuddered. No one deserved that. “I’ll do the best I can,” I promised, and then I left—still racking my brain for what I was going to tell Medina. There was no guarantee he would believe me, even if I told him the truth. If he believed me, great. If he didn’t, he had the resources to make sure I never left InDep again at best. At worst, he would warn Ms. King, and even my blue lines couldn’t calculate what would happen then.

  My phone buzzed, and I bit down a curse. What now?

  Steele’s secure messaging app held a message from Tolden. “Scramble.”

  I looked at the Tac guy standing between me and the door and said the only phrase that could hold Medina off. “I’m on Tac 47, and we’re deploying.”

  His eyes widened. “I thought 45 and 46 were on call today.”

  “Tell that to my Agent In Charge,” I called as I jogged past him. He let me go, and a few moments later I was on the helipad waiting for the others. The Tac guy in InDep wasn’t wrong. Tactical 47 had been on call two weeks ago. Tac 45 and 46 should be handling this call unless there was something that gave us the edge or they were already called out.

  Chapter seventeen

  Tolden’s face was pale when he reached the chopper. He was scanning the mission brief on the tablet in his hand while he jogged—something only a telepath would dare try. He rammed the tablet back into its holder and swung into the chopper.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  He finished jamming his harness closed. “Just get in the chopper. We lift as soon as Steele gets here to pilot.”

  I did as I was told, but I broke protocol enough to scan his mind as he finished reading the briefing. Maybe one day I would break the habit of just taking whatever information I needed from the minds of others, but Tolden was a big boy. If he got annoyed that I was using my abilities to effectively read over his shoulder, he would tell me. As it was, he stayed silent and I got the gist of the mission.

  A Superior was in the middle of attacking a civilian population in Millennium Park. Tac 45 and 46 were handling similar calls, and Tac 47 was going in because I had a record of success against them. Also, unlike the on-call Strike teams, we didn’t have any injured team members. Seventy percent of the strike teams that operated out of Martial Base had at least one member in MedDep right now.

  Black, Smith, and Steele catapulted into the chopper and secured their straps just moments after Tolden had finished reading the briefing. The chopper lifted as he started talking.

  “You all know we’ve been tracking the Company’s new deployment patterns. The places they are responding to are linked to sightings of the same creatures we fought at the base in D.C.. We’re still not sure what these Superiors are, or even if controlling them is in our ballpark, so we’ve been trying to hang back a little. Ladies and gentlemen, that just changed. Five minutes ago, Ms. Green issued a directive allowing us to take down any Superiors who might endanger civilians or draw attention to the neurodivergent world. This directive came in response to a wave of Superior attacks against civilian populations. We don’t know what the situation looks like on the ground, and we still don’t have a good grasp of Superior capabilities. We’re dropping fast and hard. Black, you’re in front with me. Smith, you’re on Turnip duty. Get them out of the line of fire. When that’s done, you’re on analysis. Don’t let the thing touch you
—you find what high ground you can and try to get a bead on it. If you get a clear shot, you are authorized to take it. These things are fast, and it’s better to drag in one dead Superior than a dozen dead civilians. Steele will be providing air support if we need it.”

  To Black’s bloodthirsty grin, he said, “Only if we need it. Understand? We’re trying to keep these things out of the public eye, and a missile strike in Millenium Park won’t help. Farina, your job is to subdue the thing mentally—or at least distract it.”

  “Drop point is in sixty seconds,” Steele warned. “We have civilian and police Turnips on the ground.”

  Tolden cursed. “Get the police forces out of the way. If they get killed trying to intervene, Ms. Green is going to have my head. Farina, can you lay a heavy compulsion on them? Get them to retreat?”

  I nodded. Laying a compulsion on a neurodivergent was difficult because they knew it was possible. Turnips wouldn’t know what hit them.

  “Drop point in twenty seconds,” Steele said.

  Black snapped out of his harness and pulled a box from under his seat. He tossed me a gun and a glove. A quick check revealed that the gun was a plasma pistol. The glove was a prototype electric weapon I’d been working on. I’d adjusted it to make use of similar paths the electric weapons in the armory used, except to run through a Superior’s nervous system. It would stun a human just fine, but it would drop a Superior for a week. Hopefully.

  I didn’t have time to ask where he’d gotten the glove. I just pulled it on, shoved the plasma pistol into an extra holster, and grabbed the rope as Tolden hauled the chopper door open.

  “Go, go, go!”

  I dropped out of the helicopter and slid safely to the ground. Smith, Black, and Tolden landed around me. The policemen didn’t seem to see us as they fired wildly at the creature bearing down on them or, if they did, they were too crazed by fear to stop shooting.

  “Superior at eight o’clock!” Black warned, and we all scattered.