Chương 24: Just Static

I happily nodded, eager to finally get into the meat of things. I wondered what the actual onboarding was going to be like, and how we were going to choose a manager for ourselves. Or whether a manager would choose us.

"Very well." Vera typed something on her laptop again, and began to read a few questions with the same practiced polish and poise as her earlier welcome. I could tell that she wasn't new to onboarding people, given how easily she slipped into her role again now that the questions were rolling. The first few were mundane and boring enough, and I thought the pattern would continue when Vera's face brightened a little. She closed her laptop.

"Is everything alright?" Nadia asked.

"Totally," she replied.

"The following questions are not really suited for your situation. They assume a single Supe as the team's decision maker, which is clearly not the case with you two. Fortunately, I have the liberty of deviating from the main script should the need arise." She smiled again, and even though she tried to make it look like she was smiling at us, I had the distinct feeling that she was smiling at me principally.

"Let's see." She took out a pen and paper. While most of the pens around here had little Latnium engravings on them, this one was a plain ball pen. The old reliable. She scratched some words on her notebook and then paused to think her first real question.

"Let's start with you," she said, looking at Nadia.

"You have completed the three unregistered claims without issue. You were efficient, methodical and most importantly, clean. No collateral damage, no injuries that I could see in the records, and no failures."

"That's correct," Nadia said, smiling.

"My Adrian is good." Vera's lips quirked up in an echo of Nadia's smile.

"I can see how highly you think of him. But, we are talking about you now. What was your role when you took the claims?" Nadia's answer was methodical and precise, just like she was out in the field.

"I helped scout, plan routes, assessed risks and decisions."

"There's more," Vera said calmly.

"You trust him with your life, don't you?"

"I do."

"But out in the field, you made the calls."

"Mostly."

"Always," Vera challenged her.

"You are the more experienced one. Don't worry, I will not pry. It is not my place to do so. I just need to assess you."

"You can tell her," I said, squeezing Nadia's hand under Vera's gaze. It made Nadia react, and again I saw a little echo in Vera's features she suppressed a moment later.

"Yes," Nadia said, shivering a little under my touch. Recomposing herself, she met our intake manager's eyes.

"Out there, I call the shots." Again, a smile.

"Interesting," Vera said.

"And it clearly worked very well for you. And, how would you react if you learned that Adrian's power is not the answer to a certain problem you are facing?" She called me Adrian, I noticed.

"It tends to be," Nadia said coolly.

"But it doesn't mean I don't have backup plans."

"She drills them into me before we take it to the field," I added. Vera blinked as if I'd taken her by surprise, then her eyes softened.

"She does, doesn't she? That's very… good." She wrote some more lines on her notepad.

"And now the final question," she said.

"What are you hoping to achieve by choosing managed work rather than being a freelancer? Fame? Recognition?" She looked at me as she said that, but her face was blank. It regained its confidence when she turned to Nadia, as if she'd cracked the mystery.

"Money?"

"I'm sure Adrian can answer this just fine," Nadia said with an easy smile.

"He's the reason I'm here at all." Vera's hand began to scribble, paused, scribbled, paused. She cocked an eyebrow at me.

"We are building a home together," I said. Vera's eyes zipped to Nadia, and a little blush made it to her face. She must have understood the implied meaning.

"And money would really help," she said.

"My thoughts exactly," Nadia said with a nod.

"Very well," Vera said.

"Now you, Adrian Hale, age twenty-five, power registered as speed and time adjacent. How much are you willing to disclose about it?"

"How much would you have to put into a database if I told you now?" I asked. I saw her face go blank for a moment.

"Interesting," she said.

"I'd expected her to be the paranoid one."

"Oh," I replied.

"I'm plenty paranoid, no worries there."

"Smart." I blinked. The way she said that, I'd think she was flirting. But Nadia wasn't growling at her, so I must have been wrong.

"You have my word," Vera continued.

"It goes against protocol, but between you and me, Latnium's protocol is designed to further Latnium's goals. And I am not Latnium." Nadia, hearing this, squeezed my hand. I had almost forgotten we were holding hands, like teenagers in love. But who cared. She nodded at me, giving me the go-ahead. That made me relax, which made Vera lean back in her chair in turn.

"Let's say it's a time-related effect that lets me reposition quickly, almost instantaneously." Vera held my gaze, waiting for something that apparently didn't come as I didn't elaborate.

"Okay," she said.

"We can work with this." She had glanced at Nadia too, and had found in her confident face what she was looking for.

"As you surely know, since you are looking for a manager, the roster is retainer first and callouts second, and the callouts are where the money is. What your manager truly earns their cut with is the rest of it. Scheduling, matching you to jobs that fit what you have disclosed, and keeping what you have not disclosed from ever becoming someone else's business." She tapped the plain pen against her notepad, twice.

"So, my assessment. Three clean claims say you can execute, and the planning behind them says it was not luck. Clean work is rarer than a good power, and you two appear to have both. What you don't have is formal experience, so let me be precise: I am clearing you for the assessment path, not for the roster itself. Pass, and there will be managers interested." I looked at Nadia. She was already looking at me, the roof and the winter and the numbers all in the little nod she gave me.

"Then we'd like to continue," I said.

"Very well." Vera closed her notepad.

"Now, if you'll come with me, Adrian. There is a temporary credential we process for new clients, and then that is everything for today."

"I'll wait for you at the truck," Nadia said, grabbing the folder we had been given with all the documents to review at our own leisure (which usually meant quickly). Then, with a smirk, she whispered in my ear.

"If that's okay with you, master." The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. I grinned. I loved how quickly she switched gears as soon as we weren't dealing with Supe-related stuff anymore.

"If you get bored, you are allowed to go to a cafe and wait for me there, alright?"

"I won't," she said teasingly.

"I'll just wait in the car. Have fun with Vera!" And then she was gone. Vera had been watching us a few paces ahead in the corridor, unable to hear, but her smirk was unmistakable.

"You have a good dynamic," she said.

"It will serve you well."

"So, this credential…" I asked. I followed her towards the staff-side exit, up the stairs and through another door above the street. This wing was a new annexation to the main building, the response center growing well beyond what the old municipal hall could contain, growing outward in haphazard and strange ways. This was a shortcut only people of the staff knew, through a little bridge of glass panes and into a nearby building.

Vera walked ahead, explaining a few things, but then she disappeared behind a sharp turn while I lagged behind, taking in the view of the street below from the bridge. The bustle of people and vehicles, military and Latnium, as well as all the Supes, it was entrancing. Then I felt it. Something brushed against my mind, like alien attention focusing at the edge of my thoughts, pressure coming from the wrong side of my skull. It was like an eye appearing in the mental space of my mind, blinking and trying to focus.

My body caught fire as adrenaline flooded me, and then the trained reflex Nadia helped me develop kicked in. Before I was even aware of it, the world had stopped into motionlessness. My ability had fired, and I was nothing but glad of all the drills Nadia and I did. I looked around, seeing nobody I could confidently say was behind the mental probing. There were no cameras, and ahead, an unknown building. Fuck it.

I turned around and bolted out of there through the only way I knew, back towards Vera's office and beyond, running as fast as I could as the seconds of stopped-time ticked down and down and down. The last second and I was near the waiting room, saw a restroom and flung myself inside and locked the door.

I waited as much as my pounding heart allowed me to wait before unlocking it and walking out, pretending to be nonchalant and feeling like a teenager returning home almost blackout drunk and pretending to be sober in front of his parents, walking stiffly and measuredly, head low and posture small.

"What's wrong?" Nadia asked as I entered the truck, locked the doors, revved the engine and took off like a thief. Shaking all the while.

"Something brushed against my mind," I said.

"I did as we practiced."

"Was there anyone?"

"Nobody," I said.

"This wasn't the plan, Adrian. You should have left alone, where they couldn't trace you."

"I wasn't going to leave you here in the truck," I said.

"And the time stop wasn't long enough to clear the building anyway."

"Adrian—" I turned to face her.

"Nadia," I said with finality.

"I am never going to leave you behind. Never. You understand?" And it was my tone of voice that made her retort die in her throat and made her face flush.

"I…"

"Tell me you understand."

"I understand. Thank you, Adrian. You always make me feel special."

"I love you, Nadia. Of course you are special."

"I love you too," she said. Then, even though it pained her.

"Park the car, now." I did. I knew what was coming. The questions.

"What's the last thing you remember? Who did you see when we walked in? What's the cat's name?" All in random order, to make sure she'd notice if my mind was scrambled.

"What's our safe word? How many times did we do it with frozen time last night? What was the last thing Vera did before I left the room?" More followed. But then, what if she had been compromised?

"My turn now," I said.

"Of course," she replied, going all meek and looking at me with her wide, brown, caring eyes.

"Nadia," I said, voice a whisper.

"Why do you love me?"

"Because you are my everything."

"Not because I saved your life?"

"No. That was just a nice way to meet each other." I smiled. The other questions were a breeze, but I already knew. She was still my Nadia.

"You know this proves nothing, right?" she said once we were done.

"A good shaper leaves you none the wiser. What we have now is a baseline. If one of us starts drifting from it, the other will notice."

"I know," I said.

"It's what we have."

"Now what?" I asked as we slowly made our way home.

"We can't go back there like this."

"We can't be sure of anything right now," she said, sighing.

"That it happened inside Latnium's building is worrying. But you were on the bridge above the road, weren't you? And there were a lot of Supes roaming around. There's no way to know who did it, or why."

"Maybe it was an accident," I said.

"Adrian," she said, going all serious.

"Mind-readers know how violating their powers are. They don't just touch people's minds by accident."

"Maybe he was inexperienced?"

"You do know this trips our memetic compulsion threshold, right?" she asked. The rule we had worked out together during the drills, ours and nobody else's: any confirmed touch on either of our minds gets treated as hostile until proven otherwise, no matter how gentle it felt. And if you start getting all defensive about it, or you steer the conversation away from it… danger zone.

"You are usually more paranoid than this."

"I am scared shitless, no worries about that. I just… fuck. Things were going so well."

"We can still make it work. We'll just have to be even more paranoid now."

"First thing tomorrow, we are buying the Mind Privacy gear."

"Agreed," she said.

"And tonight, I'll help you relax, alright? You won't have to lift a finger. Just… let me spoil you, for a change." I arched an eyebrow.

"Taking the lead? Bold."

"Well, no…" she mumbled.

"Not taking the lead per se… I'm just saying that you can lay down, and tell me what to do, and I'll do it. A massage, maybe some slow, sloppy head, you know… you are always so forceful when we do it, and it's so hot, but…"

"Yeah, I could relax tonight. I think that would be nice." ◈◈◈ Earlier. One moment he was there, like an old cathode television broadcasting static to her mind. She was used to reaching out and finding words: turn her attention on a person, and their surface rose to meet her, the inner monologue people thought was theirs and only theirs, laid bare. Even people whose thoughts had no voice still gave her something when she looked. But not him. Or rather, he was. Static, that is.

Just static, entrancing and strange and shifting and beautiful. Staring at it brought the strange pareidolic sensation that a TV would to the eyes, images and ideas that weren't real but were so, so enticing. She shook her head. She had made a mistake, a huge mistake. And now it was too late to do anything about it.

"Where is—""He's gone," she replied, making her way back to her office.

"Did his credential go through?" She looked at the clerk and heard his true thoughts.

"Why would a rando be on a Supe team file?"

"Not yet," she said.

"And I put the girl in there because they have been working as a team."

"I see," he said, in the careful tone of a man already drafting a report in his head.

"I'll escalate the situation so the superiors know it, don't worry," she said, even though she had no intention of doing anything like that. She owed it to him. Back in the relative peace and quiet of her office, she finally allowed herself to slump into her chair. The door was locked, and nobody should bother her for a while. She sighed, and cast her mind back to the brief moment of contact when her mind had tried to connect with his. The silence, the static.

It had amplified and exploded until it was all she could feel and hear. Like a song echoing distorted and strange, one she could hear but not understand. Then a spike of alarm, tension, and he was gone. What a mess. She should never have done that. But she had not been able to help herself. From the very first moment she saw him, this Adrian Hale, she had immediately been entranced. The first person she ever met whose thoughts she could not read. And he wasn't wearing shielding tech.

That always felt like blanket silence, artificially still. But not this. So she had led him through the back corridors and offices, taking a 'shortcut' that would lead him through a camera-blind path where she could disappear behind a corner and try to read him. She had to know. She had to test this anomaly. What could she see, if she only tried to actively read his mind, she wondered? It would have been funny, happening to anyone else.

He was fascinating, handsome, and quite possibly perfect, though she only had his face for evidence. A man whose intentions she could not read. And the girl, Nadia, so obsessively in love with him. Her surface had carried one conviction under all that discipline, steady as a heartbeat: he gave me my life back. No image, no how, no story. Just certainty. Worshipping the very existence he represented. Why? She had to know. She had to experience it for herself. What Nadia had, she also wanted.

And now she had burned her only bridge, had she not? She wanted to laugh at her own hypocrisy. She had told him that his secrets were his own to share, and then she had gone and tried to pry them from his mind anyway. She crossed a line. A boundary that most people find sacred and precious. Now she understood why Nadia's thoughts were so strangely ordered and obsessive.

She had been shielding herself against intrusion, and, Vera suspected, had Adrian's mind been readable at all, it would have come through just as drilled. Or did he know he was immune? If he knew, she reasoned, he wouldn't have reacted as he did. Or maybe the paranoia extended to this too, and he only pretended to be startled. If that was the case, then Vera was fucked.

A man as paranoid as he was, and rightly so—she knew the dangers of the real mind benders, not just simple readers like she was—would never forgive her if he knew. She should stay well away from him. There were many managers looking for a new team. So why was she already filling out a formal request to have him, and his devoted girlfriend as her very first managed team under her care? Why was she hoping they would accept? If they did, she was going to be just as good, just as devoted to him as Nadia.

Maybe even more. She'd never touch his mind, even though he was immune, ever again. And… she was going to come clean. Eventually. She owed it to him. Because he was a very special man, one she found interesting and fascinating and who made her chest tingle and heat up. One she could not read like an open book whenever she was near him. One she would really, really like to get to know for real. Professional, she told herself, and this time the word held.

Her first team, overseen exactly as well as she knew how to oversee. No more crossed lines. He would come to like her, and trust her, and she would never again give him a reason not to. In the justification field she typed the case any auditor would accept: three clean claims, demonstrated tactical planning, a registered category the roster could use. All of it true and yet none of it the real reason. She pressed submit. The confirmation appeared without fanfare, and Vera leaned back in her chair to wait.