The petite woman inhaled sharply in surprise before her face lit up, as if delighted. “You remember? That’s not supposed to happen.” A look of curiosity flickered over her face. “What else do you remember, Cat?”
Kat ignored the question and instead asked, “My picture you showed the woman on the table, why did it have the name Kallista Pendleton under it?”
The woman’s blue eyes flashed. “Because that’s your real name… Cat. I take it then, that you did suffer memory loss from the scorch?”
“So, if I’m Kallista, why are you calling me Kat?”
“Because that’s your nickname,” the woman explained. “Well, some called you Pre-Cat but that really doesn’t fit.”
“I don’t understand,” Sadler said from behind his pistol. His hands were beginning to shake slightly.
The woman turned her full attention on him. Her lips peeled back into an open smile and she stared at him for several moments. Finally, she slowly raised her open hands to her waist while saying, “See? There’s nothing in my hands. I don’t even like guns. I’m just going to lift up the corner of my shirt and show you something. Don’t shoot me, okay?”
Kat nodded but the woman seemed focused squarely on Sadler. “You’re not going to shoot, right?” she said insistently while pinching the bottom of her blouse with a thumb and index finger. “When we manifest and get assigned, they give us our tattoos.” She slowly lifted the fabric until the bare skin of her waist was exposed. Kat realized the location was the same spot where she wore her own, ugly scar. “Our nicknames typically come from them.”
Kat’s eyes tracked from the woman’s navel to her bare waist. A luminous subdermal wafer glowed faintly beneath the skin. It read: TLOL-9. The woman smiled. “My nickname is—”
“Lolz,” Kat finished. “I remember that name. I think I remember you.”
Lolz let the smooth fabric drop and nodded almost remorsefully. “We didn’t think you’d remember anything. The scorch should have not only rendered you psi-null but a side effect is catastrophic memory loss. Those areas of the brain are almost collocated and the scorch doesn’t burn out before it reaches the memory centers.” She regarded Kat with sad eyes. “It’s going to be more personal now, Cat. I’d much rather have just killed a stranger.”
“Psi-null?” Sadler said. “Are you saying that Kat is psychic?”
“Psionic,” Lolz corrected. “And was, not is. A psi-positive permanently loses all such abilities after a scorch. That is, after all, its purpose.”
Sadler’s brow furrowed. “But—”
“But why?” Kat blurted, cutting him off.
“For the same reason I call you Cat,” Lolz answered vaguely. “You see, my tattoo denotes me as the ninth telepath ever enrolled into the Pelletier’s Society.”
“Pelletier’s Syndrome is a fatal disease,” Kat stated.
Lolz snorted derisively. “That’s a cover story,” she explained. “For the last seventy years, the Society has been testing newborns for psionic potential. Burcet Pelletier derived the test and they’ve searched the entire megacorp for infants who test positive ever since. The cover story of the disease is a convenient excuse to take the ones they find.” She raised a hand up casually and stated mock-condolences with a flood of manufactured sympathy. “So sorry, your child has a fatal disease that demands we take him to a classified containment center. Better luck next time, Mrs. Clueless.”
The agent nearest Kat turned to Lolz and angrily barked, “Are you deranged? Why are you telling her all this? We need to kill her! Fry her brain!”
Lolz spun toward the man and answered savagely, “There are two of them, you idiot. Tell you what. Decide who you want to be shot by because as soon as I overload one, you can bet we’ll be shredded by the other.” She malevolently regarded the agent until her unbalanced smile reappeared. “Did you know that ‘deranged’ originally meant ‘to cause mayhem’ in Old French? I think I like that.”
“The Society won’t like you spilling its secrets,” the agent persisted.
Lolz waved a hand casually in the air. “Oh, give me a break. Cat already knew all this and besides, one side of this room is going to be very dead by the end of the night anyway.” She turned back to Kat with her unhinged grin. “Now, where were we?” Her eyes widened. “Oh, my tattoo! Well, it took me a while to get mine. Our powers don’t manifest until we hit puberty and, like you, I was a late bloomer. And our powers don’t reach their full potential until we finish puberty but sometimes, with the late bloomers, we manifest a second psionic power related to our first.”
She tapped at her covered waist and spelled, “T-L, O-L. Telepath, Overload. Besides being able to create a mental link with another person, I developed the ability to send so much stimulus to my target that I can effectively shut him down.” She sighed. “I suppose that’s why they made me a leader of one of the d-teams sent to find you. We knew you’d lost your powers but you’ve always been a good athlete.” She brought a hand up to her mouth and whispered as if sharing a secret. “But it’s hard to run away when you’re curled up in a fetal position.” Her red lips turned down into a pout. “But it only works on one at a time.”
“So,” Sadler asked, “Kat has a tattoo like yours?”
Lolz tittered maniacally while nodding. “Had a tattoo, but not like mine. And before she escaped, she took a medical dremel tool and ground the subdermal wafer out of her body.” She cocked her head to the side and stated with wide eyes to Sadler, “And people call me a little unstable. Your girlfriend, don’t deny it, I can tell how infatuated you are even without a link, she had the tattoo P-C-A-T dash Two.”
“What did it stand for?” Sadler questioned. He removed a hand from his pistol and shook it out quickly before placing it back to the weapon.
“Cat had the distinction of being only the second ever pre-cognitive.” Lolz looked at Kat wistfully. “Other than the first one, the closest we ever had before Cat was Peecho.” She looked at Kat with disappointment. “His team didn’t return last night. I assume you had something to do with that.”
“What’s pre-cognitive mean?”
Lolz sighed at Sadler. “It means that Cat could see the future. When she manifested, the Society knew that Cat was their golden goose. Imagine knowing revenue reports ahead of release. Imagine knowing military plans or new technologies being developed ahead of time.” She appraised Kat with narrowing eyes. “And they treated you with kid gloves because of it. You were pampered while the rest of us suffered all through puberty.”
“Why?” Kat asked. “Because of my ability?”
Lolz nodded. “Because of your ability. You see, the first pre-cog was discovered fifty years ago. He manifested at the age of nine and two months later, he was clinically insane. A month after that, he killed himself. The Society figured they had pushed him too hard during puberty while his brain chemistry was still changing. They weren’t about to lose you the same way, so they waited until you finished growing.” Her shoulders slumped dramatically and her head rocked from side to side. “And waited and waited. You didn’t enter puberty until almost fourteen and it took you until twenty for the doctors to confirm your brain chemistry was stable.” She shook her head and pursed her lips into a cruel line. “The rest of us didn’t get that luxury. We were tested, tormented, trialed and worse. But Pre-Cat stayed above it all.” The woman clucked at Kat.
“Sure, your handlers examined you often enough and they kept track of every pre-cog vision you experienced naturally but they never pushed to find your trigger or help you refine control over the ability.” A corner of the woman’s mouth tweaked upward. “But a funny thing happened… or didn’t happen. None of your visions ever came true. The Society had entire teams dedicated to searching for definitive proof that just one of your prophesies had come to pass but they all failed. By the time you were finishing puberty, they decided that your trigger was too erratic and your events must be so far into the future that they’d just lost hope. Of course, like most late bloomers, you manifested a second power.” She smiled sweetly. “Just like me.”
“What was it?” Kat asked quickly before Sadler could speak.
Lolz gestured casually at Kat’s waist. “It was the second half of your tattoo. A-T. Apportation.”
“What’s that?” Kat and Sadler asked in unison.
“You had the ability to displace objects, Cat. The physics of it is a bit beyond me but it was explained that you could push an object ahead in time. I saw you do it to a box once but all that happened was it disappeared for a few seconds.” She rolled her eyes. “Frankly, some of our biokinetic and telekinetic members are a lot more impressive than you ever were.”
Lolz glanced at Sadler before turning to Kat. “But they could never figure out why you couldn’t pull an object from the past to the present. They assumed it was because your abilities were oriented toward the future.” She snorted lightly. “Which is ironic but, given your abilities, the Society believed they could best leverage you in the field of infiltration. So that’s how you were trained. No security system in the world could stop you. You trained and worked with us for close to five years.”
The agent nearest Sadler leaned back against the table casually, lowering his right hand to rest on the table’s edge, closer to his holster.
“Don’t,” Sadler commanded. His gun, which had begun to sag from chest-level, rose as he straightened his arms.
“Easy,” Lolz cooed at him. “No one here is going to shoot you, I promise.” The woman snickered before gesturing to the agent to stand fully upright and raise his hands again.
“So what happened?” Kat asked. “Why are you trying to kill me?”
“Sixteen days ago, we got our first hit from one of your pre-cog events. It rocked the foundation of the entire Society.”
“Jesus,” Sadler muttered anxiously, still eyeing the agent. “What was it?”
Lolz’s expression turned spiteful. “For all our resources, for all our power, the Society was looking in the wrong goddamned direction. Cat wasn’t pre-cognitive at all. She was post-cognitive.”
“She predicts the past?” Sadler asked uncertainly.
“No,” Lolz answered, shaking her head. “She saw the past. We didn’t even know that was a thing.” Her eyes fluttered over Kat. “First of her kind.”
Sadler frowned. “Uh, don’t we all do that?”
“No, we see the present and remember the past. Cat saw the past,” Lolz emphasized. She cast blue eyes to Kat. “And in that epiphany, she became an even more priceless asset to the Society.”
“I don’t see how that could’ve been helpful,” Sadler stated.
“Think,” Lolz said while tapping once on her temple. “Imagine an infiltration expert who could go anywhere and when she got there, she could watch and listen to the past. Anything that had happened in the past where she was in the present. She could sit in on an executive meeting just by being in the empty boardroom where it had occurred. She could observe the planning sessions of generals, discussions between corporate leaders.” The woman smiled perversely. “Cat could sit on the bed of any CEO in the world and know who’d been there and what was said. Even our own. Every dirty, little secret would be ours.” Her smile had morphed into a rapturous grin.
“If I was so valuable,” Kat asked, “then why kill me?”
Lolz’s grin dropped between heartbeats. “Because the corks were no sooner off the champagne bottles when someone realized that your powers had been fully developed for the last five years and you had unfettered access to the compound for at least that long.” The malevolent smile slowly reappeared. “Dirty, little secrets, Cat. Only you had all of ours, and that made you far too dangerous. Our greatest asset became our greatest liability.”
“How did she escape?” Sadler asked.
“They called her into the lab for a routine trigger test,” the blue-eyed devil recounted. “All standard procedure, nothing to see here… Except that once she was fully sedated, they were going to push enough poison into her body to kill fifty Pre-Cats.” Lolz’s shoulders began to shake. She covered her mouth with a delicate hand as her light giggles turned into spastic laughter for several seconds. When she finally recovered, she shook her head at Kat and smiled regretfully. “Heinrich Wagner really shouldn’t have briefed his assistant in the same lab before you came in. When he started your sedation, the medical recordings indicate that you had a post-cog event. A moment after that, you apported the examination chair’s restraints and then, well… Doctor Wagner and Jill Anderson might have been great scientists but they weren’t very good in a fight.”
Lolz absorbed the look on Kat’s face and relished in it. “That’s right. You killed them both and then used Herr Doctor’s passcode to hop onto the net and bring up a map of the corporate region. You wrote something on a slip of paper and summoned twenty autocabs to just outside our campus.”
“And she ran,” Sadler finished. “To an out-of-the-way, flea speck of a town.”
“Not at first,” Lolz corrected with a touch of admiration. “Cat was always one, cool customer.” Her expression twisted distastefully. “First, she dremelled out her subdermal wafer.” She shuddered and admitted, “Even from the security footage… that was hard to watch.” After a moment, she continued in a strained though soothing voice, “Then, she calmly dressed her wound, walked to an emergency cabinet, withdrew a Scor-Thirty-B… and scorched herself.” Lolz blinked in disbelief at Kat as she laughed. “We’ve tested the device on students who never manifested just to see the effects before they were ‘expelled’ but you were the first, true psi-positive to be scorched. Congratulations!”
Sadler glanced at Kat while keeping his aim true. “Why would you scorch yourself?”
“Tess,” she replied in a half-whisper.
Lolz raised her eyebrows in genuine surprise. “You remember her?” She glanced at Sadler. “Tess is another telepath in the Society. We can’t all be special snowflakes, right, Cat? Tess is also a sensitive. She’s pretty adept at detecting psi-potential, in fact she helps with labels when students reach puberty. Cat probably thought that becoming psi-null would keep Tess from sensing her.”
“Did it work?” Sadler asked.
Lolz shrugged. “Both Peecho’s team and my own were sent to this little slice of Hell before they tried using her.”
“So where do we go from here?” Kat asked. “All I want is the doctor.” Her eyes tracked briefly to Reynolds.
“I don’t care about her,” Lolz confessed, “but you won’t be leaving this building alive.”
“One thing bothers me,” Sadler stated.
“Just one thing?” Lolz teased while flashing a magnificent smile.
“Kat, this woman can form some kind of a telepathic bond with a person, right? One person.” He paused briefly. “So, if she isn’t using it on you and she’s not using it on me... who is she linking to right now?”
Lolz’s face fell. “Aww, you’re ruining the surprise.”