Threader Page 2

  ‘Don’t drink too much,’ I say pointlessly. The boys are men from Bobby’s old army unit from the Corporate Wars, the last of which ended fifteen years ago. After all being discharged from the army for one reason or another, the unit now meets up for drinks every month, and when one of them prospers, that wealth’s always shared.

  ‘Make sure you stop at Davey’s on the way home,’ Bobby says. ‘Get yourself some food. Tell him Frank Accardo’s gonna fix him up later.’

  I bite my lip. I don’t mind street food so much, I’m not much of a cook. But I hate asking for favours.

  CHAPTER 2

  Outside, the air is damp and muggy against my skin. Night has fallen in shades of dusty grey and bruised blacks, penetrated by flashing neon signs advertising the latest thing you have to buy with the credit you probably don’t have. Garbage clogs the drains and the occasional burst of acid rain makes me pull up the hood of my jacket. People jostle by me, wanting to be home and dry, slick umbrellas pushed forward like battering rams.

  While I’ve long gotten used to the rank smell of pollution, occasionally I can recall a time when I breathed clean, fresh air. A time when Alice and James were alive and we were tucked away in a lonely cabin, deep in the central north island of New Zealand. It’s a happy and precious memory of my childhood, one that I hold close to my heart.

  A whirring sound fills my ears as an air-car emerges from the gloom, tyres bouncing as it lands in the street. Its doors swish open and I duck my head, not wanting to stand out. Two cops get out and hustle into an arcade bar, jaws set under wide enforcement visors. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being in the back of a cop car twice now. The first was for having contraband betting chips, a job Karla hooked me up with. The second time I was busted with a stash of illegally modified slates in the boot of my Honda. A simple transport job for some kid I knew in school who heard I did odd jobs. But bad luck had dogged me and I’d gotten busted in a random traffic scan.

  Two strikes.

  If I get pinched one more time, I’ll be shipped off to the local detention centre. If I’m lucky and manage to avoid having my talents detected, I’ll just be clipped with a neck monitor and doomed to countless hours of community work, shoving trash off the streets until my behaviour modification profile is complete. If my talents got discovered, I wasn’t sure what would happen to me. Having one isn’t illegal, but I’d read stories online of unregistered talents being snatched off the street by the cops and never being heard from again. I wasn’t sure I believed them though, nor did I subscribe to Bobby’s belief the stories were planted by sneaky corps, attempting to appear as safe havens.

  But I did believe I’d do anything to avoid being clipped. It wasn’t unusual to work a five year sentence of shovelling crap before an evaluation report stated you were rehabilitated. Three strikes also means no possibility of qualifying for a Citizenship at any stage, with the only work available being off-world. It means penalty rates off your income until you’re dead. Three strikes destroys your life and there’s no way to un-destroy it.

  No thanks.

  I duck inside an alley close to home and join a line out the front of a street-stall for some scallion oil noodles and juicy pork buns. At least, I hope they’re pork.

  Bobby and I live inside a tall block of residential apartments, sandwiched between industrial factories echoing with a cacophony of noisy machines and trade shops which are mostly fronts for black market produce. The population for the city and surrounding towns had reached its limit a decade ago and with the advent of corps terraforming off-world sites, the government has been offering free transport and relocation fees to anyone wanting to live off-world. The locals laughed when these adverts first appeared. No way was the government going to ship them off without a fight. Earth was their home and that was that.

  When I get to the front of the line, the stall owner, Davey, frowns at me. He’s a big Polynesian guy with a hair net and a stained apron over a red muscle shirt. The pork buns sit in an oil-slicked wok, bottoms being fried to a crispy finish. My mouth starts to water.

  ‘You got credit, cookie?’ He scratches the stubble on his chin.

  ‘Bobby said Frank Accardo’s back in town with some cash.’ The words come out in a rush.

  Davey shrugs and hands me a bowl of noodles. ‘You remind your uncle he also owes me for last week.’

  ‘Okay.’ I gesture to the pork buns and he scowls, but piles two into a paper bag.

  He shoves the bag at me. ‘Tell Bobby I’m in for the next card game.’

  ‘Will do,’ I say, then retreat quickly back down the street before he can change his mind about extending me credit.

  I stare at my monitor, light splashing over me as I sit in the dark, listening to soft music. It’s late and Bobby and his friends are making a racket in the kitchen. They stumbled into our small flat an hour ago, stinking of sour beer and cheap peanuts. Now they’re holed up in the kitchen, drinking blended whiskey and laughing like it’s the first time they’ve heard each other’s well-worn stories.

  My eyes run over the list of institutions offering training for talents. The Helios Academy sits at the top of my list, even though it’s in the States, a whole freaking country away. But it has the best reputation for training talents, offering education to applicants from middle school and up. It’s also the country where my parents were born, so I was more than a little curious. According to Helios’s information site, it offers a common first year of tertiary studies, before you branch off into a specialised field, of which the options seem endless.

  A small Galloway Industries logo rotates at the bottom of the screen, along with their tagline: Expanding Humanity’s Horizons. A multinational corp, Galloway Industries is known for advancement in the nanotechnology, health and security sectors. Not to mention being the first corp to begin terraforming practices on earth, an attempt to repair the radioactive crater that was now New Mexico, and then off-world on Mars. They’re also one of the few organisations that emerged from the Corp Wars with a better reputation than when the bloodshed had started.

  A second screen is also up: this one is a government listing of talents and their sub-designations. My finger hovers over the first three groups: primal, hydra and slider, before I touch the file that opens the fourth group: esper. I’ve been here many times and know the words by heart. My eyes latch onto the esper sub-designation I long ago identified myself with.

  Threader

  1. Above baseline TK and TP abilities.

  2. Merging of talents provides ability to control or magnify another talent.

  The words glow blue against my data screen. While I’ve never tried to thread with anyone, nor do I even know how to, this is who I am. A threader. I’m sure of it. My kind aren’t common, and they aren’t exactly the big shots of the talent pool. That’s reserved for the super-smart hydras with their regeneration abilities, and the rage-prone, crazy-strong primals. Sliders, the fourth category of talents, are regarded with some suspicion after a slider assassinated the French president in his own bed nearly a decade ago. Bobby and I watched the anti-talent riots on the screen in the shop, Bobby with a cricket bat in one hand and me chewing my nails, worried someone might have guessed what I am.

  While it isn’t really illegal to stay unregistered, the government has done its job in brainwashing people to believe it’s irresponsible, if not dangerous, for a talent to ignore registration. The last thing I want is to be registered against my will. Exposure is dangerous was what James and Bobby taught me. Of course, if I was a Citizen, I’d be protected by more rights than I have now, with a corp assigned lawyer to safeguard me. No angry mobs at my door, demanding I come clean about what I am to the government.

  But my puzzle-chest has done its job over the years, hiding away my talents. It’s strong as steel in construction and guarded with intricate mechanical puzzles, impossible for any random telepath to break. Well, I hope it’s impossible, since I showed quite a flair for solving them when I was
little.

  Before James died, I was completely obsessed with the trick boxes he made for me. I was never good at word or number puzzles and more than once gave up on a game of Sudoku in tears. My talent is with mechanical puzzles. A puzzle or trick box that can only be opened by moving interlocking elements in the proper sequences to engage or disengage secret mechanisms inside. James spent hours crafting these little boxes out in his little shed behind the house, trying to come up with a design to stump me. Any time he brought me a new one, I ignored the outside world until I figured it out. As soon as my fingertips touched a mechanical puzzle, it whispered its secrets to me.

  A cheesy advert starts up at the bottom of my screen and, half caught in memories of the past, I watch it play. These adverts are one of the government’s attempts to keep the public informed about talents. Some people, like me, are born with them, while others are revealed at puberty. This advert shows a teenager who’s woken to find his arms covered in thick hair. Hey Ma! Look! I’m a primal! The parents roll their eyes at each other and contact their local government, so their son can be registered on the global talent registry. Smiling government officials show up and everyone practically starts high-fiving each other.

  These adverts work well enough to contain most of the worry about talents. Then there are the corp sponsored documentaries, explaining the mutations’ origins. The standard explanation is of a shadow biosphere, a secondary biological world that folds around ours. The theory is that it leaked now and then, rebooting junk DNA in babies, resulting in the mutations. Naturally, the leaks have long since been contained by hard-working corp scientists and there’s no need for undue alarm.

  After Alice died and on the rare occasion James drank, he’d sit at our chipped Formica kitchen table in our cabin home and talk in hushed tones about the shadow biosphere, almost like it was an entity to be afraid of. Then he’d move to the dangers of a global talent registry and how we were one step away from being rounded up and clipped. He didn’t think much more of the corps either, with their aggressive recruitment campaigns for talents, willing to educate and employ talents of any category. But my father’s paranoid legacy passed along to Bobby, who makes it clear to me he wants me as much off the grid as possible. Because I love Bobby, and because I loved James, I tried to respect their wishes. But now, with Bobby’s poor health and mounting bills, I’ve had a change of heart.

  A ragged bray of laughter snaps me out of my thoughts and a glance at the clock on the screen tells me I’ve got fifteen minutes to get to the Crystal Cave. I swipe the monitor off and grab my coat, closing my bedroom door firmly behind me. There’s little chance I’m going to be able to sneak past a bunch of retired army Rangers, so I poke my head into the kitchen.

  Six burly men are crammed around our tiny kitchen table, playing cards and trading friendly insults. I catch Bobby’s eye and jerk my head to the front door.

  ‘At this hour?’ Bobby frowns at me. ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Leave the girl alone.’ One of his friends crumples a beer can in his hand. He’s wearing a rumpled security uniform with mustard stains down the front.

  ‘Welcome back, Frank.’ I give him a tight smile, nodding at the others. Before he went to work off-world, Frank always had a nice word for me, along with a sleazy smile. I don’t like him much. There’s always something a little lecherous in his eyes when he talks to me.

  ‘Have a hot date, Josie?’ he asks, laying down a card.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ Bobby growls, then eyes me suspiciously.

  ‘Just meeting friends,’ I say.

  Bobby shrugs, looking relieved I even have friends. I wave goodbye and hot-tail it out of the apartment.

  ‘Josie, wait.’

  Turning, I see Frank following me out on the landing, huffing a little. I pause, not wanting to be rude, but my skin crawls at the prospect of having to be near him.

  He stops near me, smoothing back his greasy white hair. ‘Did you have a nice dinner?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Frank steps a little closer. ‘You need any money for tonight?’

  ‘No. I’ve got it covered.’

  ‘Yeah. Bobby’s a good sort. Always looking out for you.’ Frank takes another step towards me. Faint alarm bells ring in my ears. ‘You know, if you ever need anything, I can take care of it.’ His pale lips part in a smile, revealing missing front teeth. ‘It’s a hard life out there for a young woman, if she doesn’t have someone looking out for her.’

  ‘I don’t need anyone to look out for me,’ I say sharply.

  ‘You say that now, but if you need some extra cash.’ Frank lifts a hand and trails a finger along my arm. ‘You only have to ask.’

  Without thinking, I let my TK fly out and shove into him like a fist. Frank gasps and doubles over, stumbling back.

  ‘Don’t ever touch me again,’ I hiss, then whirl and race down the two flights of stairs to street level, face burning. It’s not as if it’s the first time a grubby old man has hit on me, but I expected better behaviour with Bobby’s friends. Resolving to tell Bobby what happened as soon as he’s sober, I head to my car, pausing when my slate chirps from my back pocket. My model is five years old and has unicorn stickers along the frame I can’t scratch off. But when it appeared in the shop, I snapped it up, proud I finally had something everyone else took for granted. Not that I’d advertise my clunky piece of hardware. The new-gen slates are flexible, with a slim control-handle you can bend and clip around your wrist. And they cost more than I make in a year. I frown down at the number on the display, not recognising it, then hit answer and wait for an image.

  ‘Hello?’

  Static greets me and I quickly hang up, my nerves jangling. I’m not worried about the lie I told Bobby about where I was going tonight. Helping Karla with her séances skirts the law, but each session boosts my bank account by fifty credits, so I consider it worth the risk. I’m nervy because two weeks ago, I weakened and sent an anonymous email to the Helios Academy, asking about the enrolment process. If James were alive and knew what I’d done, he’d have a fit. And if Bobby finds out? He’ll have a second heart attack for sure.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘You remember the drill?’

  Karla taps a scarlet nail on the top of her glass counter, which is full of crystal charms and tarot cards. She’s wearing a turquoise turban and gold hoop earrings with a sweeping dress that shows plenty of crinkled cleavage. Her electric cigarette is gone and I can smell stale wine on her breath.

  ‘I remember,’ I assure her.

  Karla gives me a kind smile. ‘You’re a good girl, you know. Working for your uncle so hard.’ She leans forward. ‘He knows, doesn’t he? What you can do?’

  ‘We don’t talk about it.’ I shove my hands in my pockets and shuffle my boots around. As far as Karla knows, I’m just a TK who helps her con. The idea that my talents theoretically have the potential to combine and manipulate others is something I didn’t think she’d be comfortable with. Karla’s lips thin and she shakes her head. ‘Your uncle is stuck in the past, thinking having a talent is a disability.’ Her eyes narrow. ‘You think you might register one day?’

  ‘Not likely,’ I murmur, hoping Karla is going to drop it. I’m not really a sharing kind of girl, especially not to a con artist with more strikes against her name than she can count. I heard Karla was clipped twice, but managed to bounce back each time. It’d only be a matter of time, though, before she broke.

  Karla crosses herself, though I’m pretty sure she’s not religious. ‘Every morning I wake, I thank the good Lord I wasn’t cursed with one of those other talents.’ She fakes a shudder. ‘An esper has some class, you know? Not like the hydras and primals. Nothing more than animals.’

  I keep my mouth shut. Frankly, I’d love to be something other than a threader. Something impressive. I spent many nights staring at my bedroom ceiling as a girl, wishing I was a hydra. Primals sound gross, with all the medication needed to keep reversi
on at bay, and sliders seem insidious, with their ability to travel through shadows. But if I was a hydra? Then I’d be smart. Freaky smart. And with those kind of brains, I would have already figured out how to get Bobby and myself out of our grotty, run-down neighbourhood. We’d be living uptown, slapped with a couple of Citizenships from a sponsoring corp and a handshake from our upstanding neighbours.

  Karla glances down at a monitor on her counter and claps her hands. ‘The customer has arrived. Show time, my dear.’

  I hustle myself into the back room where a two-way mirror gives me a view of the entire shop. A small table and two chairs are set up in the middle of the room and Karla busies herself with lighting the candles. A moment later, the shop door opens and a woman walks in. Her hair is pulled back and her clothes are rumpled. Her knuckles are white around a tattered handbag and she keeps blinking, like she’s got something in her eyes.

  ‘I’m here for the reading,’ she says. ‘Emma Wilston sent me.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Karla guides her to the table and both women sit. ‘Dear old Emma. How is she?’

  ‘Just fine.’

  Karla hesitates at this answer and I tense, sensing this is the wrong answer. The woman sees Karla’s reaction and quickly adds, ‘Of course, that’s if you don’t ask her about her arthritis.’

  Karla’s shoulders relax. ‘Yes, yes. Poorly afflicted, she is.’

  I rub the back of my neck and try to will away my tension. Nerves hamper my talents, so I try to focus on relaxing. It’s not that I’m unsure I can use my TK—it’s my TP I have to keep under control. I’ve always used my talents separately, have never threaded with someone. Personally, I can’t see the advantage in linking my talents to another talent. All I know for sure is that when both my talents get free of the puzzle-chest, they always cause some sort of chaos.