Butler, Octavia - Mind of My Mind

“Calm down a little,” he said. “I know you feel good, but calm down.”

“High,” I said. I grinned at him. “I feel high. You know.”

“Yes. See if you can rein yourself in enough to tell us what you did.”

“You know.”

“Tell us anyway.”

“Took some of their strength.” I leaned back, relaxed against the couch, pulling my thoughts together. “Only some. I’m not a monster. At least not the kind you made me think I was.” Then, as an afterthought. “I took more from Jesse. I didn’t know what I was doing when he jumped me.”

“Seth, check Jesse,” Doro ordered.

Apparently Seth did. I didn’t pay any attention. “He’s still breathing,” Seth said after a moment.

“Rae,” Doro said, “how do you feel?” Rachel was conscious then. But she didn’t say anything. Curiosity reached me through my private haze. I looked at her.

She was crying. She wasn’t making any noise at all, but her whole body shook. She made a sound of pain as we all turned to look at her, and hid her face in her hands. She was shielded to the others. But to me she radiated shame and defeat. Humiliation.

That reached me and cleared the nonsense out of my head. I stood up, half expecting to find myself staggering. I was steady enough, though. Good.

I went to her and took her arm. I knew she wanted to be away from us. Tears, especially tears of defeat, were private things. She looked up, saw that it was me, and tried to pull her arm away.

“Stop acting stupid,” I told her. “Get up and come on.”

She stared at me. I still had hold of her arm. She started to get up, then realized how weak she was. She was glad enough to lean on me then.

She swallowed, whispered, “What about Jesse?”

What in the name of heaven did she see in him? “The others will see that he gets upstairs,” I said. I glanced back at Doro. “She’ll be okay.”

He nodded, went over and draped Jesse’s big body over one shoulder, then followed Rachel and me upstairs.

Chapter Eight

MARY

The meeting just dissolved. Nobody made me any promises. Nobody bowed or scraped. Nobody even looked scared—or felt scared. I checked. Once they got over their surprise, they were even reassured. They could see that Jesse and Rachel were going to be all right. They could see that all I wanted from them was a little cooperation. And now they knew they would be better off if they cooperated. The atmosphere of the house was more relaxed than it had been since the day of my transition.

Seth Dana came up and grinned at me. “Don’t you get the feeling you should have done this two weeks ago?”

I smiled back and shook my head. “I don’t think so. Two weeks ago, I would have had to kill somebody.”

He frowned. “I don’t see why.”

“Everything was too new. You were all on short fuses. You and Ada hadn’t gotten together and mellowed each other, so one or both of you would have been against me. If you had, Karl probably would have, too. He was about ready to strangle me anyway, then.” I shrugged. “This is better. People have had time to cool off.”

He gave me an odd look. “What do you think might have happened if you’d waited a little longer than two weeks, then, let Jesse and Rachel do some mellowing?”

“Jesse and Rachel weren’t mellowing. They were feeding on each other’s hatred, building each other up to jump me.”

“You know,” he said, “I got the impression at first that you just threw this meeting together on the spur of the moment.”

“I did.”

“Yeah. After two weeks of watching everybody and making sure your timing was as right as you could make it.”

Clay Dana came over to where Seth and I were talking. Close up, he looked sort of gray and sick. I thought he must have just had a bad bout of mental interference. “Congratulations,” he said to me. “Now that we all know the new pecking order, do either of you have any aspirins?”

Seth looked at him with concern. “Another headache?”

“Another, hell. It’s the same one I’ve had for three days.”

“From mental interference?” I asked.

“What else?”

“I thought you weren’t getting as much of that now as you used to.”

“I wasn’t,” he said. “It stopped altogether for a few days. That never happened in the middle of a city before. Then, three days ago, it started to come back worse than ever.”

That bothered me. I hadn’t paid much attention to Clay since he arrived, but I knew that anything new and different that went wrong with him, with his out-of-control mental ability, would eventually get blamed on me, on my pattern.

Seth spoke up as though on cue. “Look, Mary, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you

could figure out what was happening to Clay. He’s been in really bad shape, and it just

about has to have something to do with the pattern.”

“First the aspirins,” said Clay. “Find out what you want after—Hey!”

That “Hey!” was almost a shout. I had gotten rid of his headache for him fast—like switching off a light.

“Okay?” I asked, knowing it was.

“Sure.” He looked at me as though he suddenly wanted to get away from me.

I stayed with him mentally for a few moments longer, trying to find out just what was wrong with him. I didn’t really know what to look for. I just assumed that it had something to do with the pattern. I took a quick look through his memories, thinking that that uncontrolled ability of his might have tuned in on the pattern somehow. But it hadn’t in any way that I could see.

I scanned all the way back to the day he and Seth had arrived at the house. It was quick work but frustrating. I couldn’t find a damned thing. Nothing. I switched my attention to the pattern. I had no idea at all of what to look for there and I was getting mad. I checked the pattern strand that stretched from Seth to me. Seth was in mental contact with Clay sometimes to protect him. Maybe, without realizing it, he had done something more than protect.

He hadn’t.

I had nowhere else to go. There was something especially galling about suffering a defeat now, just minutes after I had won my biggest victory. But what could I do?

I shifted my attention back to Clay. There was a glimmer of something just as I shifted—like the glimmer of a fine spider web that catches the light just for a second and then seems to vanish again. I froze. I shifted back to the pattern, bringing it into focus very slowly. At first there was nothing. Then, just before I would have had a strong, clear focus on the pattern strands of my six actives, there was that glimmer again. I managed to keep it, this time, by not trying to sharpen my focus on it. Like looking at something out of the corner of your eye.

It was a pattern strand. A slender, fragile-seeming thread, like a shadow of one of the comparatively substantial strands of my actives. But it was a pattern strand. Somehow, Clay had become a member of the pattern. How?

I could think of only one answer. The pattern was made up of actives. Just actives, no latents until now. No latents period. Clay was on his way to transition.

The moment the thought hit me, I knew it was right. After a ten-year delay, Clay was going to make it. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t sure. After all, I had never seen anyone who was about to go into transition before. But I couldn’t even make myself doubt. Clay was going to come through. He would belong to me, like the others. I knew it.

I brought my attention back to Seth and Clay, who stood waiting.

“That took long enough,” said Seth. “What did you find out?”

“That your brother’s not a latent any more,” I said. “That he’s headed toward transition.”