Soulwalker (3 page)

“I don’t know…”

“Come on, Mom. I haven’t seen you in ages. I’ll send a hover out for you in a few weeks.” Tarris was so lonely that even a visit from her mother would be welcome.

“Honey, I…” Tarris could see the indecision in her mother’s eyes. Something was going on. “I’ll think about it, okay?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“I’ll get back to you sometime next week.”

“Good.” Tarris couldn’t hide the disappointment in her voice.

“Honey, don’t be like that. I will think about it… honest.”

“Fine. I’ll hear from you next week then.” Tarris felt snubbed. She had an urge to see her mother in the flesh instead of on the videophone, but the woman balked at the invitation.

“Take care of yourself, Tarris.”

“You, too, Mom.” The screen went blank, and Tarris stared at it. Her mother, Clerek, was the only one who accepted everything that she was. Well, everything that she knew about. To her mother, it didn’t matter that Tarris was albino. Her mother considered it just a matter of color and not class distinction.

Tarris had never known her father. Clerek was part of the artificial insemination program run by the Union, so the father’s identity was never revealed. Still, she had been the only albino in a neighborhood of dark-haired children. Even her own twin was a dark-hair, or so she was told. Why was she so different? Didn’t that go against the laws of science?

She wondered. Her naturally suspicious mind had always thought that strange. Was she genetically engineered or just part of the natural selection? She hoped to her god that she was a natural aberration and not part of some master plan by the people in power.

She smiled. The accident that resulted in her losing the use of her legs would cripple their plans.
Serves you right, you bastards! Meddling in things that are better left alone.

She steered the wheelchair back to the kitchen and reached for a caffeine pill and a bottle of what she thought of as water. Over the generations, the liquid had been tinkered with, manipulated, and altered at a microscopic level. Who knew what the liquid had first tasted like? Maybe it was like the rain that fell. She hoped not. The contaminants in that would slowly poison her.

Tarris returned to the computer screen, popped the lid on the bottle, dropped in the pill, and activated the heating pack on the side. She placed the bottle down on the table to allow the mixture to ferment.

An interesting article had been sent to her by one of her powerful friends, and she began to read it while sucking on her beverage. A mediprac had done some innovative research on nerve regeneration, and Tarris was eager to find out if it could help her. She wanted to get out of her chair any way she could.

It sounded promising. She looked for the mediprac’s name. Asher Hyrea. Tarris moved her chair to a shadowed corner of her apartment. “Safe…” she murmured. A small block of the wall became transparent and revealed a metal box inside. Here she kept her secrets, the material and emotional ones. She extracted a small device, momentarily looking into the box and studying its contents. If they ever found out what she possessed, her life would be forfeit. It didn’t worry her though. If they got that far, she’d be dead anyway.

She put the box back in the alcove and closed it “Stealth…” The cloaking device was the best she was able to obtain, just like her other little toys in the box. Not only did the field hide the box, but also it was resistant to all types of electronic probing. To those who searched, it was just another piece of wall.

Tarris plugged the tiny device into the computer port. The Silencer now made communication safe, setting up a ghost line that made it invisible to all but the sender and the receiver. It was worth its weight in crude oil. Touching the name, she waited momentarily for the person to answer. When the call remained unanswered, she left a message to try to arrange a meeting in a few solar days. By then her next assignment would be completed and she would be rested.

Tarris read the article again. To date no one had even come close to this kind of research, and if this person had any chance of getting her out of her chair, Tarris would call on every friend she had to make it happen.

She finally let her lethargy overcome her. She wheeled back to the bed and pulled her immobile lower half onto the platform. “Light off. Locks on.” Her home now secure, Tarris touched the medicated patch, and as sleep slowly descended, her heart was a little lighter with the thought that she might have a chance to live a normal life again.

Chapter 2

The day had barely begun when Tarris woke. Rain continued to fall and settled a heavy gloom over the city. While she lay in bed and looked at the ceiling, she tried to decide whether to go back to sleep or try to make something of the day, because tonight… well, tonight was work.

She’s just woken up from a dream, one that she hadn’t had in quite a while. Why was she dreaming about Boothe now? So much had happened in her life since then. She had done so many vile, unspeakable things in the name of the Council that they had become a blur. Boothe was just a passing friend who died in suspicious circumstances…

“Why?” Tarris asked angrily.

“It was an accident, Tarris,” the teacher said.

“But… but, Educator Charis, I don’t understand. I know who did this, and you let him get away with it.” She wanted justice, and she wanted it now.

“But you can’t prove that. We can’t just summarily punish him without proof.”

“So Boothe dies without justice?” Tarris could feel her restless spirit squirming around inside her.

“Are you all right?” Charis looked at her with concern. “Tell me what you feel.”

“You know what I feel. Why do you ask me?” Tarris had learned that her ice-blue eyes slowly darkened to a cornflower blue when she experienced emotional turmoil. Of course Charis observed that.

“Because you need to vent these feelings. You need to let go.”

“I don’t want to let go. This is all so unfair.” Tarris’s anger rose.

“What about the power within you? What is it doing now?”

“She is crying out for revenge!” she screamed.

“She?” Tarris could see that Educator Charis was interested, and it annoyed her to no end that he was dealing with it in an almost clinical way.

“Yeah, she. She’s churning away inside me, and she wants to come out.”

“She’s evolving like you are, Tarris,” he explained patiently. “Puberty is a turbulent time. Maybe she’s reacting to what you feel.”

“I know that. Stop treating me like a child.” Tarris paced angrily, like one of those caged lions she had seen on the archive discs. She had heard the rumors about her “potential,” but she wasn’t interested. She just wanted to be normal, to be invisible. The constant scrutiny upset her. She had been labeled “a freak of nature,” because they had heard whisperings of secret experiments. Not that she believed it. Tarris was a breed apart, and she was suffering for it.

“Calm down. Breathe deeply like you’ve been taught.”

Charis’s efforts did nothing to help her. In fact, it only irritated her more. “Why? Why am I different?”

“I’m sorry, child, I can’t answer that. All I know is that you, unlike the others, were one of twins, and a mixed union at that.”

“No others?” Strange.

“No. Everyone who has passed through here was born as a single child. Maybe those blue eyes of yours are not so much an imperfection but a sign that you’ve been touched by your sister.”

Tarris grabbed onto that explanation with both hands. She vainly tried to find some positive thing out of her birth. “What about what I feel inside? It… it’s so strong… too strong.”

“Then I will see to it that your training is accelerated so you can control her.”

Control her? Did Tarris want to do that? In her younger years, Rya had been a comfort to her, a friend when she had none. Did she want to do anything as callous as control her like some object? “What about Boothe?”

“I’m sorry, Tarris, but the ruling has been made. It was an accidental death.”

Tarris shook her head to dispel the image and the emotion the memory held. She was rested enough and was looking for some diversion from the job to come.

Work of late concerned her. In her mind she tried to justify what she did by claiming that if she didn’t carry out the assassinations someone else would. It was a pretty poor excuse, even to her. Still, she made the deaths as quick and painless as possible, taking no joy in the kill.

She reached for the button and waited impatiently for mobility. The wheelchair moved over to her single window, and she looked out. Gray cloud obliterated the sun. She thought about what she wanted to do for a moment, and a slow smile crossed her face as she made her plans for the day. She knew exactly where to go.

A short time later she was on the street. The rain dripped down her damp hair into her eyes. When a taxi pulled up, she activated the hidden buttons on her belt to move the body suit to a seated position inside the cab. “Park Three.” The low volume of her voice carried to the speaker that connected her to the driver. Smoothly, the electric car moved into the sparse traffic and headed toward the center of the huge city.

Tarris looked out the window and watched the world pass by. Despite the rain, life went on. While not many pedestrians stepped out into the foul weather, many took covered walkways or taxis. Private cars were for the rich, while the general populace was forced to find alternate transport.

The car pulled up in front of a massive block of metal. Conspicuous only by its size, inside it was a wonderland. Tarris placed her wrist against the scanner in the cab for the machine to access her tattooed barcode. The amount of credits for the trip would be automatically deducted from her account. She studied the black ink on her arm. The small lines encoded everything that she was—her finances, her health, her status, everything, right down to the tiny mole on the bottom of her ass. Nothing escaped them.

It took a few moments for the servos to click into an upright position to enable her to walk, and waiting for them left her hunched over in the rain. Water droplets hit her hair and ran down inside the collar of her coat. “Damn it!” Impatiently, she kept tapping the servo buttons. “Come on… come on…” She felt like an idiot standing in the rain looking at the ground.

Finally, after interminable seconds, the suit responded and she moved swiftly to the sheltered doorway. Her barcode gave her entrance to the building, and she sighed deeply as she stepped through the door. Like that old, old movie,
The Wizard of Oz,
which was one of her favorites, she stepped over the doorway from black and white to living color.

Before her lay a massive park, filled with trees, grass, and birds—a little bit of the old world that she adored. She looked up to the sky, a holographic delight filled with fluffy white clouds and bright sunshine, and breathed in the fresh dry air. It was a beautiful piece of Old Earth in the midst of depression and bleakness.

Steam rose from her damp clothing as she wandered along the pathway, and warmth seeped into her cold bones. While no one in the park knew her true identity, Tarris was a walking contradiction to both white and dark eyes. She was a white eye who loved the light, and she did everything she could to keep that her secret.

Her hand rose to her temple and touched the skin to darken her eyes further. The suit ran smoothly in the warmth, apparently enjoying the dry air as much as she did. Why was it that everything worked better in the light?

“Tarris! Back again I see.” A man, maybe in his seventies, sat on the grass under one large tree while he idly picked at the cloth on his pant leg.

“Darmen. Do you live here or something?”

Darmen casually leaned against the tree trunk and enjoyed the sunny day. “If I could, child, I would, but somehow I don’t think the Park Service would let me.”

“Child?” She was thirty-two years old, she was no child.

“To me you are, Tarris.” When he graced her with a genuine smile, age lines crinkled his skin. “Enjoy your youth, my friend.”

“I’ll try, but these days there’s little to enjoy.”

Darmen, a casual friend whom she met whenever she visited the park, didn’t know of her disability or her origin. At moments like these, she wished for a friend who knew everything, someone she could let her façade drop in front of and be herself. It would never happen though. Having a friend like that was too dangerous, both for that person and herself.

Rule Two in her Survival Handbook: Don’t cultivate friends to be used as hostages by your enemies.

While this rule led to a very lonely life, breaking it had dire consequences. Living alone never worried her excessively before, but of late, a lot of things in her life were becoming burdens. Everything had been fine up to the present. Why was she questioning her life now?

“Come… sit.” Darmen patted the grass next to him.

“Not today, Darmen.”

“It’s a beautiful day, Tarris. Take a load off those feet of yours.”

“You are living in a dream world, my friend. Have you seen outside?”

“Of course, but don’t you agree this is much more pleasant?”

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Tarris chuckled at his easygoing banter. Her friend was apparently letting his worries float past him, at least for a short while, as he enjoyed the respite in the sun.

“Come,” he said, tantalizing her. “Come.” He again patted the ground. She was so tempted to try, but her suit wouldn’t allow such a maneuver and that would eventually lead to an explanation.

“As much as I’d like to, I can’t.”

“Can’t, or won’t?” The twinkle in his eye and the sly grin on his lips told her he wasn’t taking any offense at her refusal.

“Can’t.” She quickly thought. “My hips won’t flex that much. I’d get down there but never get up.”