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

  The blue lines blinked an answer in front of my eyes as they finally spit out their numbers.

  Ninety-seven percent chance of death. Three percent unknown. If I told anyone in the Agency about Mom’s burning mind, she would die.

  I hissed. How was that possible? I pulled the underlying data to do a more intentional analysis, but the data was gone. All that remained was a phrase I never remembered writing.

  “If you want Adalind to stay alive, keep her away from all this. The Agency can never know about her.”

  I twisted the plasma pulser ring on my finger like it would lend me some vestige of comfort. It was just cold.

  Where had that message come from? It was written into the lining of my mind like it belonged there.

  Regardless, I couldn’t drag Mom into this mess. I would ask around discreetly, to see if I could find something that could help her, but I couldn’t tell Mom about any of this until I knew more about what was going on with her.

  Chapter Three

  The next morning, I made Mom some breakfast and left it on the counter for her to find when she woke up, along with a note about having forgotten something at school. I made it to school fifteen minutes early, and found Ms. King and Tabitha Smith standing by the entrance to the elevator in the back of her classroom with long fabric draped over her arm. Any questions I’d been planning to ask about Mom—covertly, and without getting Mom involved—got pushed to the back of my mind as my blue lines converged on the fabric Ms. King held. A quick analysis showed that it was a blood red dress—a complement to the blue one Tabitha was wearing. It was floor length, and rippled with every motion Tabitha made, from the beaded top, to the floor.

  Abnormal conditions noted flashed on my vision. The way the bottom of the skirt amplified any motion from the bodice indicated that it couldn’t possibly be normal fabric. The sheen coming off the beads was only a sixty-point-two percent match to the beads I’d seen on clothing. What was it?

  Ms. King chuckled as she noted my confusion. “That’s the same look Tabitha got when she heard the rustle of the fabric—or lack of it, anyway.”

  “Something that moves this much should be loud. These sounds have been damped.” Tabitha smoothed the sides of the dress down.

  “That’s because it’s not fabric,” someone else said. The elevator doors opened to reveal Cal, the head of R&D. I’d worked with her intermittently on projects when I needed a second opinion. More often than that, I helped her track down Steele when he was dodging her calls. Apparently he felt the same way about physical engineering as I felt about software engineering.

  She glanced at Tabitha. “It is gorgeous on you, though. I had worried about the height modifications, but it looks to be working better than the last round, don’t you agree?”

  The engineer’s declaration that the dress was not made of fabric prompted a second round of analysis. I still couldn’t come up with a name for the polymer, but the function was clear. “It absorbs energy.”

  “Right!” Cal snapped her fingers at me, and spun. “That thing will stop a bullet, slow a knife, and let you walk away more-or-less intact if you get hit by a truck—so long as it hits the dress, and not the sleeves.”

  “What sleeves?” Tabitha beat me to the question. The dress had a high neckline with no sleeves. The effect was a beautiful piece of bulletproof art to wear at a party, with a glaring weak point.

  Cal laughed. “Exactly. Now let’s get back down to nerd town, and I’ll get started with the real briefing.”

  Ms. King handed me the red dress. “I’ll be back in a few hours to give you your assignment. Until then, work with Cal. She’s got experience few people still working here do.”

  I looked at the slip of not-fabric in my hands, then looked back up at Cal. What, exactly, was I supposed to do with this? Work out the math?

  “There’s a place to change in R&D. Don’t worry, it’s not as frivolous as it looks—and you’re in Tac Block 4, which means you’re just as likely as Medina’s people to actually use the thing.” Cal’s intent was clear. I was going to have to put it on.

  I followed Cal into the elevator, racking my memory for the last time I’d actually worn a dress—and the only times I could come up with were parties where Zach had made me wear this little black slip of fabric he called a dress. In the six months we dated, it happened three times. Before that, nothing. It was hard not to look at the dress in my hand with disgust.

  “Hey, I get it!” Cal said as we exited the elevator and made our way across the rotunda that served as the heart of the Agency. “I wasn’t really one for dresses, either. They tend to get caught in gears, or stained with motor oil, or torn, or melted—I could go on. But every once in a while, a girl likes to look good. The fact that you’re bulletproof—”

  “—except for the arms,” Tabitha interjected.

  “—is just a plus. And anyway, you’re going to end up in places where formal attire is absolutely required in order to do your job. What if there was a telekinetic assassin determined to assassinate the British Prime Minister while she was at a party? Are you going to walk in there with a tactical suit? Imagine what a stir that would create!”

  “It’s the formal version of our tactical suit,” Tabitha said. “There’s not quite as much storage in the girl’s version, but Tolden and the others can keep all the tactical suit toys in their tuxedos. We’ve got to learn to improvise a bit. Also, fashion has officially taken precedence over safety.” She glared at her bare arms for emphasis. “First, no pants pockets in street clothes, then no arm protection in battle dresses. What’s next? Are you going to take the spikes out of our heels?”

  Spikes in our heels? I inspected a few images from when I’d seen stilettos in stores. The shoes themselves were spikes. Had R&D modified them even farther? I could see the appeal of a last-ditch knife hidden in the heel, but it was no substitute to a gun on my belt. “We have room for our firearms still, right?” I asked. If I was wearing something like Tabitha was, I wanted as many weapons as I could get.

  Cal swiped us into a room just down the hallway from the makespace where I usually worked before she answered. “Depends on the type. You have to leave the heavy stuff, but you can definitely still fit a glock. I’m sure we could even modify the dress to carry a power pack for that plasma pulser of yours—and we definitely could for the electric one you’re working on. You want a rifle, you’re out of luck.”

  Which didn’t disqualify any of my weaponry. Black hadn’t cleared me with anything larger than a handgun yet—although I’d proved my mettle with every weapon we’d tried so far.

  “I’ll get started with Agent Smith out here, while you go change.” Cal said, and motioned to another door at the side of the room, just to the right of a two lane shooting range. I hurried to do as I was asked.

  The dress fit snugly around my body. The beaded top was stiff like armor, but I could still feel the breeze generated around my waist by the skirt. The tactile input was strange—I rolled it around in my mind for a moment, and then decided I didn’t like it. It took too much processing away from what was around me to deal with the fact that I felt naked from the waist down.

  In the mirror, I didn’t look like me. My black hair was still in a ponytail, and my eyes were still green. Everything else was wrong. The dress cupped my breasts, leaving nothing to the imagination, and then nipped in to my waist which was small, but muscled. I could see the curve of my hips and how it tapered down to meet my long legs, like in one of those magazines at the store. This was the farthest thing from the baggy blue jeans and black hoodie I wore to insulate myself from searching stares while I was on the street. I looked weak like one of those models—fake, like I was pretending for Zach.

  I pushed the images of him firmly away and took a deep breath. Zach was gone. I hadn’t thought of him in half a semester, and I wasn’t going to start now. I was a tactical agent, n
ot his plaything, and this was so I could do a job. In Social History, they talked about the importance of deception. This was just an illusion. Just because I looked weak, didn’t mean I was. Just because this dress made my arms look small and easily snapped didn’t mean I couldn’t hold my own in a fight. I let them see the curve of my hips so they would be distracted, and then I could take anything I needed to take. It was a game.

  That didn’t mean I had to like it, or that I felt any less naked.

  I took a deep breath, then froze as air skated up and down my legs. The hem of the dress flipped out and then back to try and spread the motion over as much surface area as possible—distributing the force and decreasing the pressure.

  I pushed the calculations away and nodded at myself in the mirror. I could do this—

  The bob of my head set the dress dancing again, and another set of numbers rose to my vision. I bit my lip. This was going to be annoying.

  Cal gasped when I finally got the courage to come out of the changing room. “I knew you would look good, 32, but you’re absolutely stunning! You should dress up more often.”

  I clenched my teeth. “Let’s just get this done as quickly as we can. It’s driving me crazy!” Suddenly feeling naked wasn’t nearly as much of a problem. I didn’t have time to focus on that because every time I shifted, the dress sent changing patterns of air against my legs, and another round of analysis started. I could shut it down, but that took effort. I could already see the headache that would come if I had to stay like this for over an hour.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked, suddenly concerned.

  “The airwaves. Even breathing sends airwaves everywhere!”

  Cal was already nodding. “You have some tactile sensory issues, and this is very different, isn’t it? One moment.”

  She disappeared for an eternity, then returned with some new slips of fabric. “It’s the same stuff we use to line all of Black’s clothes—he’s got a similar problem, you know. I can redo the lining of the bodice later to try and minimize some of the issues, but we can start by putting these leggings on. It should feel more like you’re wearing pants.”

  Sure enough, the leggings she’d given me calmed the storm of analysis. The dress was bearable. It was still fake and uncomfortably skin tight, but I could deal with discomfort now that the sensory overload was gone.

  Cal grinned. “See? Not so bad now. I’ll add your name to the tactile lists in our tailoring section to prevent more mishaps like this down the road—and you tell us if there’s anything you want modified. That’s one thing about a place where everyone’s neurodivergent. Everyone’s got their quirks, and not everyone’s equipped to communicate them, so we learn to watch for things like this. In engineering, we try to tailor everything so that it works for the individual agents. The last thing you need is to be fighting sensory overload while you’re in the field.”

  Cal guided me over to where Tabitha was checking the equipment she’d stowed in her dress, and showed me how to secure the leg harnesses that would hold whatever equipment I’d picked for the mission. The dress had a slit I could activate by pressing a certain spot in the beading on the bodice of the dress. In the current configuration, the slit only stayed open for two seconds before it tried to re-fuse—to prevent anyone from noting the gun I had strapped to the inside of my leg. It took a few tries before I could retrieve any of the items I’d stowed within the two second window without accidentally getting my hand caught in the fabric.

  “A few more days of practice, and you’ll be almost as good at retrieval as Smith is,” Cal said.

  I looked at Tabitha, who was standing in the nearest shooting lane. Her hand moved like a blur as she pulled the weapon, sighted, and fired. The whole sequence only took one-point-six seconds.

  “She’s one of the fastest we’ve got. I thought Medina would snatch her up for the intelligence half of InDep, but she got assigned to Tactical 47 instead—due to her analysis skills, if I had to guess. Every team in Tac block 4 needs someone who’s good at infiltration, and Smith’s it.”

  Tabitha put her gun away again and turned. She probably heard the whole conversation. “I don’t know how good I am, but it is fun,” she said. Her voice was still quiet, and her eyes were still on the ground, but her head was lifted just enough for me to read the words on her lips.

  Cal sighed. “It is, isn’t it? One day, you’re going to miss it.”

  Tabitha arched an eyebrow. “You used to work in InDep, right? Before you transferred to a post in R&D?”

  “How did you guess that?” Cal asked, then waved a hand. “Nevermind, I should know better than to ask you analysis types. You’re right, though. I started as a deep cover agent. After a while, it got too dangerous. I wanted something more stable, so I came here and started designing technology to help the agents I’d left in the field. One thing led to another, and I ended up as the head of R&D. That’s how things tend to go here. They use you for what talents they need the most—doesn’t matter if you’re good at it by accident—until you can’t do it anymore. Then you’ve got your pick of assignments.”

  Which was why I was working in TacDep instead of spending all my time in R&D with my motorcycle, or shielding module, or the grappling hook design I discovered in the archives of my mind last week. The Agency needed my analysis abilities to help Tac 47. They had plenty of people who could come up with innovative technology like the dress I was wearing.

  Cal must have seen some of my thoughts on my face—that, or she was a telepath—because she said, “The sort of field work you’ll be doing really isn’t too hard. You use skills you’re going to have to develop either way. As a projector telepath, your mind operates on a higher frequency than most, so you can get inside their heads to find the information you need. The biggest problem is that—for an intel extraction operation—you don’t want them to know you’re there. Many experienced Psionics can tell if a telepath is deep enough in their mind to search for information, so you’ll be restricted to reading surface thoughts.”

  Tabitha smiled. “How horribly difficult. Some of us have to manipulate them into telling us what we need to know.” Her surface thoughts revealed the sarcasm that must have been heavy in her voice, even though I couldn’t decipher it. I took a moment to be grateful for my newfound telepathy. It made social situations so much simpler.

  “The key is guiding the conversation so that they start actively thinking about the information you need without them knowing that’s what you’re after,” Cal explained.

  I got the sinking feeling she was about to try and teach me how to do exactly that.

  Cal and Tabitha, who had evidently gone through this training before—understandable given that she’d been recruited by the Agency about a year before she transferred to Martial Academy—spent the next three hours, twenty-two minutes, and eight seconds trying to build on what Ms. King had taught the Social History class about the ‘art of conversation’. When my brain started to hurt from absorbing those rules, they moved on to how to walk in a dress, and the unique tools the dress gave for distracting men. Most of it was just an extension of things Ms. King had already touched on in her Social History class, but it still made me feel like when I used to pretend for Zach. How could Tabitha stand this? All these lies and deceptions?

  I was relieved when Black arrived to start the next section—how to fight in a dress.

  By the end of that session, I was certain the dress really was bulletproof. If it could survive completely unscathed from a sparring match with Black, it could survive anything. When Black finally conceded that I wouldn’t trip over the dress in a fight, I reported back to Cal. Finally, I would be able to take the dress off—even if it was only for a few minutes while I ate lunch.

  When I headed to the changing room to get in my street clothes again, Cal stopped me with a smile.

  Instead of giving me a few minutes of respite, sh
e sent me up to the Agency cafeteria with the blasted thing still on. Her surface thoughts revealed that she wanted me to get used to wearing it, but I was sure she was partially motivated by sheer cruelty. Still, lunch didn’t last long, and most of the tactical agents in the cafeteria didn’t stare. They’d probably had the same training. That reassuring fact didn’t keep my ears from heating every time someone looked at me, though.

  Tabitha didn’t mind. It came a lot more naturally to her. She moved with the dress like she was born to it. Her conversation skills were great, too. I wondered if it was because, while I was busy analyzing colors and designing holographic models of the things I saw, Tabitha was busy doing the same with every conversation she heard.

  “Tolden should have sent you down to talk to Houston,” I said, during a break in the training. She might have been able to convince him to come in without a fight.

  Tabitha frowned. “That might have been the plan. I’ve been slated to join Tac 47 for the better part of the year, and it isn’t unknown for someone to be backed on their graduate assignment by their eventual team. Knowing what actually happened, though, I’m glad it wasn’t me. Manipulating conversations is great when you don’t know who you’re talking to. Houston would have heard my lies almost immediately, and I probably wouldn’t have survived.”

  I reviewed the conversation I’d had with Houston again and nodded. Tabitha was right. She might be better at conversation, but she didn’t have my plasma pulser, and she couldn’t have screamed in his mind to keep him from using his telekinesis—although maybe her telekinesis would have helped keep him from almost shooting Tolden. I wasn’t entirely sure how a tug-of-war between telekinetics worked. I made a note to pay more attention to the telekinetics in Social History. That data might mean the difference between life and death one day.