Authors: Susan Kaye Quinn
Closed Hearts (35 page)
“I keep remembering these things…” He pressed the heel of his hand to his head. “These snippets that I don’t understand! I can’t help it if I end up places where you happen to be. I don’t want to…” He searched for the words. “…stumble across you in my life.” He pointed a finger, like he wanted to stab me with it. “I don’t want you controlling me anymore!”
My lips trembled, but I pinched them tight and spun around, nearly mowing down tiny Mrs. Weissmann in her tied-up tight gray bun.
“You!” Mrs. Weissmann said, making me nearly jump out of my skin. For a split second, I thought she was yelling at me, but she shook her tiny fist at Raf. “Get outen my kitchen!”
Raf glared at her, then stomped his way out of the diner. The bell crashed when the door flew open and made a tiny ding when it slowly closed. The kitchen staff stared at Mrs. Weissmann and me. My mouth worked, but I came up with nothing to say.
She turned her back on me and stalked to her office.
The kitchen eased back into its normal motions. Silence fell as everyone returned to mindtalking. I didn’t bother linking into their heads—the look on Tracey’s face, still standing by the swing door, told me what they were thinking. Unless I was going to erase all of their memories, I could never come back to the diner. And there was no point in erasing their memories, unless I tracked down Raf and erased his too.
Which I didn’t even consider.
I forced my legs to walk down the hall to Mrs. Weissmann’s office. Raf not only forgot he loved me—he believed the lies that his parents told him. I shouldn’t have expected any less. It was just my spectacular bad luck that he ended up in the diner and outted me to Mrs. Weissmann’s patrons. I should have left sooner—that way Mrs. Weissmann wouldn’t have to pay the price for employing a jacker.
I stood in her doorway. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Weissmann.”
“Sorry?” she said. “What do you have to be sorry for? That boy should be sorry! Coming into my kitchen and causing a scene! He’s a strubblich bum, nothing more.” She coughed to clear the roughness from her throat. It was the first time I had heard her speak out loud. Her Pennsylvania Dutch accent was even stronger verbally than it was mentally.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” I said even quieter. “I’m sorry…” I gestured to the kitchen down the hall. “I’m sorry that people will think badly of you for hiring a jacker.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She waved her hand at me as if fanning away my words. “Enough of dis sorry. One does what one has to, Kira. You wait tables. I pay you. There’s no need for sorry.”
She had called me
Kira
. I smiled through the pain that was tearing the hole in my heart wider. It was the first time she had used my name. The first time I had known for sure that she knew who I was. When did she know? Did it matter? It didn’t seem to matter to her. Mrs. Weissmann would keep me on, let me earn money for my family because she knew we needed it. Even if I was a jacker. Even if everyone knew it. A peculiar shame burned my cheeks, like I didn’t deserve her kindness.
I slowly untied my apron. Even though Mrs. Weissmann meant well, I was done with other people paying the price for who I was. I pulled the apron over my head and bunched it up until I found the nameplate among the folds of fabric. I tapped it several times, scrolling through the names. Not finding the one I wanted, I jacked into the mindware interface and scrit a new name.
Kira.
I handed the wadded up apron and nameplate to her.
“Thank you, Mrs. Weissmann,” I said. “For being a good friend.”
She frowned, but took the apron from me. “It’s not right.” Her voice was soft. “What this criker Vellus is doing.”
I nodded.
It wasn’t right, and it would get worse. Because, ultimately, Vellus was right. Jackers and readers couldn’t coexist. They couldn’t love one another. They would hate and fight and with someone like Vellus leading the way, the dangers of being a jacker—or a jacker sympathizer—would only get more extreme. It wouldn’t only be dangerous for good-hearted people like Mrs. Weissmann who intentionally hired me to work in her diner. It would be dangerous for anyone I rooked into thinking I was a reader.
I walked out the back door of the Dutch Apple and pulled out my phone to hail an autocab. A few minutes later, it whispered up to the dumpsters behind the diner. I fed it every last uno that I had from tips, climbed in, and set an autopath for the lake. I didn’t look back as the Dutch Apple got swallowed up in the endless, winding suburban streets.
The bright afternoon sun glared the windows, making it difficult to see the thin stretch of beach. Weeds and blown trash snarled the sand, which rose and fell in mounds tufted with grass. This was where Raf and I would have come, if we could. If the world hadn’t gone demens.
If things were different.
Different?
Raf’s voice rang in my memories.
Different how?
He had wanted to know why I wouldn’t kiss him, that long ago day in the chem lab, when I still thought I would be a zero my whole life. When I thought not reading minds like everyone else was the worst thing that could happen to me. I should have kissed him and not cared what other people thought.
Instead, I said,
If I was different.
It was the only truth I could tell him then. If
I
was different, things would have been different between us. But all my wishful thinking hadn’t changed the world one bit, and now I was the only one who remembered that moment—Raf’s version was lost forever.
I pressed my hand to the autocab window, peering through my fingers at the weak waves lapping the shore. The beach was just as unreachable as it had ever been.
People like Vellus and Kestrel and that diner full of readers would never let me pretend I was someone I wasn’t. No matter where I ran, no matter how well I hid, I would always be in danger of being found out. I could leave my family behind, but anyone else—any friends I dared to make, any employer I tricked into hiring me—they would always be in danger of getting caught in the cross fire when my past caught up to me. There would always be the threat of dangerous jackers or ruthless reader politicians dropping in and ruining their lives. Running away would only delay the inevitable.
There was only one place I could go where that wouldn’t be true.
One place where I would have no danger of running into Raf ever again. Where I wouldn’t be alone and I wouldn’t have to hide. Vellus was right: the future would be a fight. It would be readers versus jackers, and with Vellus’s anti-jacker crusade, Kestrel’s experimental torture chambers, and more and better anti-jacker technology, jackers would lose.
Unless they decided to fight to win.
I jacked into the mindware interface of the autocab and set a different autopath.
The autocab flew past businessmen hurrying between skyscrapers on their way to the next appointment in their normal lives. The demens wandered out in the open, the spring air fresh with the potential of warm days to come. The towers of the city shrank as the autocab wound away from downtown. It slowed as it neared the end of the autopath. The sunshine had drawn out the changelings, and they perched on the steps of Myrtle’s brownstone, watching me go by.
I sent my dad a scrit to let him know I was okay, then left the phone in the autocab, so it would be carried far from Jackertown. The door of the mages’ converted factory was brand-new, black with a purplish sheen, like Mr. Trullite’s limo. It looked strange against the crumbling brick of the factory and made a dull thudding sound when I pounded on it. Julian pulled it open, dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt that was scuffed with dirt. He looked like he’d been repairing machinery, grease on his hands and dark marks on his arms.
Or maybe he had been assembling weapons.
His eyebrows flew up. For once, words seemed to fail him as the shock of me showing up on his doorstep took hold. But he didn’t look unhappy to see me. Finally, he said, “Keeper!”
“My name is Kira.”
a short prequel to
Open Minds
Book One of the Mindjack Trilogy
If you enjoyed
Closed Hearts
, please
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coming soon...
Free Souls
Book Three of the Mindjack Trilogy
(for future releases)
(for contests and giveaways)
Visit the
Mindjack Trilogy Website
anthology of love stories with The Indelibles
a teen love story
a short afterstory to
Life, Liberty, and Pursuit
First and foremost, thanks to the many people who read
Open Minds
while I was writing
Closed Hearts
. Your enthusiasm, reviews, and general cheering-on made the process of writing this book a joy as well as a labor of love.
My amazing cover designer, D. Robert Pease, made me look good again by creating a beautiful face for the story inside—thank you, Dale, for lending out your genius. Many thanks go to Anne of Victory Editing for catching my typos, correcting my hideous comma abuse, and compensating for my complete inability to hypenate. Any mistakes that remain are due to things I messed up after she fixed them. (Un grand merci pour ton amitié to Julien Morgan for allowing me to borrow his name for a certain revolutionary character. I hope you like him.)
Critique partners are invaluable to any writer, and I’m lucky to have had brilliant ones to help me fill in the holes and bolster the structure of
Closed Hearts
. Much appreciation goes to Rebecca Carlson, Adam Heine, and Sherrie Petersen for braving that early draft: I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the final version. Thanks go to Rebecca Carlson (again—seriously, what would I do without you?), Rick Daley, Laura Pauling, Dianne Salerni, and Magan Vernon for their insightful critiques of a more reasonably polished version of the story. Finally, a grateful cyber-hug to Carol Riggs and Sheryl Hart for being typo-sleuths for the final version of the story.
A special thanks goes to my son Adam Quinn, a writer in his own right, for being my teen beta reader this round. I’m grateful to my entire family for letting me hijack our dinner discussions with talk of mindreading and mindjacking. To my sons Sam and Ryan: thank you for your many helpful suggestions for Books Two and Three, and even if I don’t actually use the squad of hyperactive mindjacked squirrels in the story, please know they’ll be there in spirit.
A final thanks to my husband: for making everything possible and at the same time making it worthwhile.